Migration plan for a cloud service to Service Fabric: 

Goal: List some of the considerations towards the migration of a web service hosted on IaaS infrastructure to Service Fabric. A description of the summary and features of Service Fabric are shown here. This article focuses on architectural decisions and recommended practices. 

The migration cost is usually a sliding scale between the extremes of no code changes to the existing service to refactoring for stateless microservices such that they can be run on serverless platforms. Proper choice of migration strategy can ensure a great deal of satisfaction for all stakeholders.

A typical approach to migrate existing workloads is the lift-and-shift strategy. For example, the workload can be provisioned directly to another VMs with network and storage components and deploy the existing applications onto those VMs. Another approach is to move the application to PaaS platform. The drawback of the lift-and-shift strategy is that it often results in overprovisioning and overpaying for compute resources.

The cost-effective way of running applications has been demonstrated by the container orchestration framework. Containerizing an existing application enables it to run on a cluster with other applications. It provides improvements in resource usages, dynamic scaling of instances, shared monitoring and DevOps.

Optimizing and provisioning the resources for containerization is not trivial. Service Fabric allows experimentation by scaling out the instances on demand. Both Windows and Linux applications can be migrated to a runtime platform without changing code and their instances can be scaled without overprovisioning VMs. The result is better density, better hardware use, simplified operations, and overall lower cloud-compute costs.

Even a large set of Windows-based web applications on erstwhile IIS hosting infrastructure can be migrated to Service Fabric with improved density, monitoring, consistency, and DevOps all within a secure extended private network in the cloud. The principle is to use Docker and Service Fabric’s containerization support that package and hosts existing web applications on a shared cluster with preconfigured monitoring and operations. This results in an optimal performance-to-cost ratio.