Microsoft Azure Service Fabric 8.2 Sixth Refresh Release

Azure Service Fabric 8.2 Sixth Refresh is now available!

We are excited to announce that the 8.2 Sixth Refresh release of the Service Fabric runtime has completed rolling out to the various Azure regions along with tooling and SDK updates. The updates for .NET SDK, Java SDK, and Service Fabric runtimes can be downloaded from the links provided in Release Notes. The SDK, NuGet packages, and Maven repositories are already available in all regions.

This release will only be available through manual upgrades. Clusters set to automatic upgrades will not receive this release. For how to configure upgrades, please see classic or managed documentation.

Key Announcements

• Azure Service Fabric will block deployments that do not meet Silver or Gold durability requirements starting on 11/10/2022 (The date is extended from 10/30/2022 to 11/10/2022). Five VMs or more will be enforced with this change for newer clusters created after 11/10/2022 to help avoid data loss from VM-level infrastructure requests for production workloads. VM count requirement is not changing for Bronze durability. Enforcement for existing clusters will be rolled out in the coming months.
  For details see Durability characteristics of the cluster.
• Azure Service Fabric node types with VMSS durability of Silver or Gold should always have the property "virtualMachineProfile.osProfile.windowsConfiguration.enableAutomaticUpdates" set to false in the scale set model definition. Setting enableAutomaticUpdates to false will prevent unintended OS restarts due to the Windows updates like patching, which can impact the production workloads.
  Instead, you should enable Automatic OS upgrades through VMSS OS Image updates by setting "enableAutomaticOSUpgrade" to true. With automatic OS image upgrades enabled on your scale set, an extra patching process through Windows Update is not required.
  For more information see: VMSS Image Upgrades

Packages and Versions

• Service Fabric Runtime
• Ubuntu 18 - 8.2.1485.1
• Ubuntu 20 - 8.2.1485.1
• Windows - 8.2.1686.9590
• Service Fabric for Windows Server
• Service Fabric Standalone Installer Package - 8.2.1686.9590
• .NET SDK
• Windows .NET SDK - 5.2.1686
• Microsoft.ServiceFabric - 8.2.1686
• Reliable Services and Reliable Actors - 8.2.1686
• ASP.NET Core Service Fabric integration - 8.2.1686
• Java SDK
• Java for Linux SDK - 1.0.6

• Service Fabric PowerShell and CLI
• AzureRM PowerShell Module - 0.3.15
• SFCTL - 11.0.1

Breaking Changes

Customers running Azure Service Fabric Linux Clusters will not be able to scale out or reimage (manual or auto via VMSS OS Image Update) nodes or create new Linux clusters without first upgrading to Service Fabric version 9.0.1086.1. Also, if your application requires JDK, then you will need to install a JDK of your choice since SF will not install the JDK as part of the SF installation. Starting 8/19/2022, the following versions have been deprecated and will not be available on Linux for new cluster creation or node reimage/scale out operations:

9.0 CU2/CU1/RTO

8.2 CU4/CU3/CU2.1/CU2/CU1/RTO

Details: Service Fabric Runtime (for Linux) placed a dependency on Zulu for Azure build of OpenJDK which is no longer supported as announced in their dev blog. Since the creation of new Linux clusters or scale-out/reimage of nodes required all the dependencies to be installed, these workflows broke when the dependency became unavailable.

Beginning with the 9.0 CU 2.1 release, Service Fabric Runtime will no longer install any JDK dependency which will ensure that customers can scale out, reimage, or create new Linux clusters. If your application needs JDK, please utilize an alternate mechanism to provision a JDK. To get the latest Service Fabric Runtime releases with this change, follow the upgrade documentation. If your application depends on a JDK, please be sure to install one of the available choices.

For more information see: Breaking change for Azure Service Fabric Linux customers

Breaking Changes with BackupRestoreService: If a Service Fabric cluster has periodic backup enabled on any of the app/service/partition, post upgrade to 8.2.1686.9590, BRS will fail to deserialize old BackupMetadata. BRS will also stop taking backup and restore on the partition/service/app in question with changes in the new release even though the user app, cluster, and BRS shows healthy. Additional information regarding the breaking change is available in Release Notes

For more details, please read the release notes