Optimizing Azure Service Fabric Workloads with the Well-Architected Framework

The Azure Well-Architected Framework assists architects in the creation and review of their cloud workloads with guidance spanning five pillars – reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence, and performance efficiency. These are cross-cutting and cover the entire scope of the workload. Additionally, it’s often beneficial for an architect to focus on a core component of the workload, and the Well-Architected Framework also delivers targeted, on key workload components.

Today we’re going to be looking at the Azure Well-Architected Azure Service Fabric guide. Like all the Well-Architected Framework service guides, the Azure Service Fabric guide delivers checklists and recommendations across the same five pillars, but with a focus on workload architectures that include Azure Service Fabric. If you are just starting an architecture that includes Service Fabric or have one already in production, using the checklists and recommendations from this guide can help you identify opportunities to optimize your solution and to make sure you stay on the right path.

Scenario

Consider you’re responsible for architecting a backend for your B2B e-commerce platform. You’ve selected Azure Service Fabric Managed Clusters to be the primary compute layer for the APIs supporting the frontend. The workload will be containerized, using reliable services. Your team has prioritized the security and reliability pillars as your primary workload decision drivers. As a solution architect, you’ll need to consider the Service Fabric cluster operator’s role of providing a secure and reliable application platform that supports the application developer’s responsibilities. Likewise, you’ll need to consider how a Service Fabric developer should be leveraging the Service Fabric platform and programming models to build serviceable, secure, and fault-tolerant APIs to serve their customers’ needs. You can use the Well-Architected Service Fabric guide for simple and direct advice for both Service Fabric cluster operators & application developers.

Combining the Well-Architected Framework’s overall guiding tenets with the Well-Architected Azure Service Fabric guide for security and reliability, plus considering key recommendations items from the other three pillars, you extend your workload architecture recommendations to introduce some additional components. You suggest key Azure Policies that should be in place, recommend a better way for Service Fabric application developers to access secrets by using Key Vault integration, and take advantage of additional Availability Zone support throughout the architecture. Your usage of these self-service solutions has helped you produce a workload that achieves your target SLOs and non-functional requirements. You add a backlog item to revisit the guidance periodically to make sure your workload is incorporating any new recommendations and to evaluate any architectural changes made to the workload since the last review.

Related Azure Well-Architected service guides

Like all application platforms, Azure Service Fabric is rarely deployed without supporting Azure resources such as Layer 7 gateways or underlying data & storage platforms. Check out the Azure Well-Architected service guides for those other services that are in your workload’s architecture. For example:

• Azure Application Gateway for fronting web applications hosted in Azure Service Fabric
• Azure API Management for fronting APIs hosted in Azure Service Fabric
• Azure Storage for Azure Service Fabric application workload storage

Structured workload reviews

If you’re looking for a more structured review experience, one that can track progress over time, be sure to assess your Azure Service Fabric workload in the Azure Well-Architected Review assessment. Also contact your Microsoft Partner or Microsoft architect to help perform a personalized and guided review across one or more pillars.

Author Bio

Chad Kittel is a Principal Software Engineer who creates technical assets to support architecture guidance across Microsoft Docs. He also leads the architecture review process for Azure Architecture Center’s contributor success program.

For more information about the Well-Architected initiative, please click here.