Windows Server 2016 Modern Application Platform Features -1: Microservices

Posted 2020-09-07

Microsoft has made a focused shift to ensuring that customers today, whether they are in the public or private cloud, have a solid foundation for their application portfolio. There are two new technologies introduced in Microsoft Windows Server 2016: Nano Server and containers. With these new technologies, you can take advantage of a highly optimized, scalable, and secure experience for Application Platform.

Microservices

When it came to applications built for the web, we generally moved away from traditional n-tier architectures toward Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This was no easy task and put a lot of customers off rewriting their applications. SOA breaks down an application into components, which communicate with one another via some communication protocol.

It could be said that SOA is the forefather of microservices, given that microservices breaks down even further to smaller components that each live and run as an individual process and communicate with one another in a language-agnostic fashion.

Microservices foster more rapid development versus SOA. This is because the components that

dictate a microservices model are far smaller than SOA. If you need to make a change to a component in microservices, you can develop, update, and deploy rapidly without affecting the operation of the other components. Each component is technically an independent contractor, so each has its own way of doing things and separate way of communicating. Because all of these components share a single communication model, this makes it simpler to improve parts of an application built on microservices.

Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes building microservices or translating your application into microservices architecture easy to do, while also giving you the means to manage the full lifecycle of an application. It is available both on-premises and in Azure as Azure Service Fabric.

You can write an application once and deploy it on-premises or to Azure with no API change using, all while using common development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio.

Service Fabric powers many Microsoft services today, including Azure SQL Database, Azure

DocumentDB, Cortana, Power BI, Intune, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT, Skype for Business, and many other core Azure services. All the learnings from running these solutions have been incorporated into the Service Fabric product and will ensure that if your applications need a highly reliable and scalable solution, this is your microservices platform of choice.

For details, please ref the Microsoft free book: Introducing Windows Server 2016 at http://aka.ms/mspressfree   or email me at [email protected]