Service Fabric is going open source

Microsoft has officially blogged that the company is open sourcing Service Fabric under the MIT licence in the coming months, when it will transition to an open development process on GitHub.

Service Fabric, first known as Windows Fabric, is Microsoft’s Azure Platformas-a-Service 2.0 microservices platform. It also competes to some degree with Kubernetes, as both platforms can act as orchestrators by packaging, deploying and maintaining applications and containers.

Microsoft officials have referred to Service Fabric as its ‘secret sauce’, and use it internally to run pieces of the Azure core, Skype for Business, Intune, Event Hubs, Azure SQL DB, Cosmos DB, Cortana and more. Microsoft has made available Service Fabric for Windows, Linux, Windows Server and for Linux in Azure. As of now, you can compile and test Service

Fabric for Linux — everything from the low-level clustering and federation layers all the way up to process and container activation.

The blog also stated that Microsoft will be opening up Service Fabric for contributions from the community, in the near future.

The Linux version of the Service Fabric repo and related build and test tools are available on GitHub, allowing interested parties to run basic tests, open issues and submit pull requests. Microsoft is working on getting the Windows version migrated to GitHub too, according to its blog post. Over the past year, Microsoft has open sourced various pieces of Service Fabric, including Reliable Services, Reliable Actors and its ASP.NET Core integration libraries. Microsoft’s plan is to open source its entire runtime, plus a build environment for Linux and Windows.

Microsoft has, of late, been open sourcing a lot of its software, services and even its documentation.