Enterprises today need to walk a fine line between innovation and delivering reliable services. Firms need to be able to rapidly create and run mission critical enterprise applications that have the potential to capture new areas of growth for the organization, creating the opportunity to increase their exposure in the market and meeting changing customer needs. At the same time, system reliability is equally important since application downtime has a real cost to a business’s reputation, finances, and customer loyalty. For example, customers expect an online banking or e-commerce site to be up and running any time of day across any browser, device, or app. A company that doesn’t meet these 24/7 availability expectations and needs is at risk of losing customers to their competitors. Increasingly, businesses are turning to the cloud to develop and manage their applications at scale and with high availability.

Microsoft’s Azure Service Fabric, our microservices application platform for developing and managing cloud-scale applications, was released last year to help developers build and manage cloud-scale applications.

I am excited to announce today that Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server will be generally available for download at no cost. With today’s announcement, customers can now provision Service Fabric clusters in their own data centers or other cloud providers and run production workloads with the option to purchase support for ultimate confidence. One such customer is Owners.com, an online platform that gives consumers a convenient and cost-effective way to buy or sell a home.

"Our on-premise installation of Azure Service Fabric is a robust and highly scalable platform on which we've been able to build very complex software as a collection of easily manageable modules. This new paradigm of service development allows us to rapidly develop, test, and deploy (with zero downtime), all while meeting tight SLAs for our production environment." Marion Denny, Director of Engineering at Owners.com

We unveiled Service Fabric preview on Linux earlier this month, furthering our vision to enable developers to build Service Fabric applications on the OS of their choice and run them wherever they want. Battle-hardened internally at Microsoft for almost a decade, Service Fabric has been powering highly scalable services like Cortana, Intune, Azure SQL Database, Azure DocumentDB, and Azure’s infrastructure. We’ve seen tremendous response from our customers and great momentum since our recent GA at Build 2016.

Azure Service Fabric allows the creation of clusters on any machine running Windows Server or Linux which means that you can deploy and run Service Fabric applications in any environment that contains a set of interconnected computers, be it on-premises or with any cloud provider. Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server enables you to create clusters on Windows Server machines, particularly focused on running Service Fabric in your data centers. This means you get benefits such as:

Using data center resources you already own and developing microservice architectures on premise before moving to the cloud.

You can choose to create clusters on other cloud providers.

Service Fabric applications, can be deployed to any cluster with minimal to no changes. This can provider an added layer of reliability because you can move your applications to another deployment environment.

Developer knowledge of building Service Fabric applications and the operational experience of running and managing Service Fabric clusters carries over from one hosting environment to another.

We’re excited that with our continuous updates to Service Fabric, more businesses can take advantage of our innovations to develop and power their applications. Learn more about how to get started with Service Fabric.