Azure Service Fabric – scalable, reliable, and easily managed microservices

As part of BUILD the Azure team have released the Service Fabric framework at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/service-fabric/

Documentation looks quite limited at the moment, but the framework has some amazing capabilities:

* Reliable Actors http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-reliable-actors-get-started/

Similar to Orleans (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/orleans/) you can obtain an Actor by ID and use async/await to speak to it with location transparency.

* Reliable Services http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-reliable-services-quick-start/

Write scalable and partitioned services in C# .NET code with ease, often just implementing a RunAsync() method call for your code. You get to utilise distributed collections (List, Queue, Dictionary) that have replicas and automatic failover - you won't need Redis in this case.

* Cluster Monitor http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-visualizing-your-cluster/

* Not locked in to Azure - you can run this on-premise