April 14, 2009

Fabric terminology

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Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. This topic details the terminology used by Service Fabric in order to understand the terms used in the documentation.

The concepts listed in this section are also discussed in the following Microsoft Virtual Academy videos: Core concepts, Design-time concepts, and Run-time concepts.

Infrastructure concepts

Cluster: A network-connected set of virtual or physical machines into which your microservices are deployed and managed. Clusters can scale to thousands of machines.

Node: A machine or VM that is part of a cluster is called a node. Each node is assigned a node name (a string). Nodes have characteristics such as placement properties. Each machine or VM has an auto-start Windows service, FabricHost.exe, which starts running upon boot and then starts two executables: Fabric.exe and FabricGateway.exe. These two executables make up the node. For testing scenarios, you can host multiple nodes on a single machine or VM by running multiple instances of Fabric.exe and FabricGateway.exe.

Application concepts

Application Type: The name/version assigned to a collection of service types. Defined in an ApplicationManifest.xml file, embedded in an application package directory, which is then copied to the Service Fabric cluster's image store. You can then create a named application from this application type within the cluster.

Application Package: A disk directory containing the application type's ApplicationManifest.xml file. References the service packages for each service type that makes up the application type. The files in the application package directory are copied to Service Fabric cluster's image store. For example, an application package for an email application type could contain references to a queue service package, a frontend service package, and a database service package.

Named Application: After an application package is copied to the image store, you create an instance of the application within the cluster by specifying the application package's application type (using its name/version). Each application type instance is assigned a URI name that looks like this: "fabric:/MyNamedApp". Within a cluster, you can create multiple named applications from a single application type. You can also create named applications from different application types. Each named application is managed and versioned independently.