Following a successful period of private beta testing after its Build 2018 debut, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Service Fabric Mesh is being made available for more widespread public testing.

Azure Service Fabric Mesh is basically a kind of serverless version of the more familiar Azure Service Fabric, which is one of the foundational technologies that powers the core infrastructure of its Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Azure Service Fabric is a microservices platform that’s designed to make it easy for developers to package, deploy, manage and scale up software containers and related services.

Microservices refers to a way of developing software, web or mobile applications as suites of independent services. These services are created to serve only one specific function, such as user management, user roles or social media logins. They’re also independent of each other, meaning they can be written in different programming languages and use different data storage resources. Software containers, in turn, are development environments that are used to abstract microservices-based applications away from the underlying hardware, so they can be built just once and run on any infrastructure.

Azure Service Fabric Mesh enables containerized applications to be deployed and run without needing to manage things such as instances, configure network resources or provision cloud storage. It works by analyzing the resource requirements of each application and the available infrastructure, then automatically scales, rolls out upgrades and self-heals whenever it’s required.

The platform supports both Linux and Windows containers, Microsoft said.

With Azure Service Fabric Mesh, developers can deploy container-based microservices directly from the Azure Portal or Command Line Interface, or from within Microsoft’s integrated development environment Visual Studio. The service is priced on a per-second usage basis.

Microsoft said developers who are using Visual Studio can download the Azure Service Fabric Mesh tools that allow them to debug and publish their apps to the service from today. Once it’s deployed, Azure Service Fabric Mesh runs in the background, automating functions such as scaling, service discovery and other maintenance tasks.

“Although many enterprises want move to serverless platforms as soon as they can, they struggle with understanding, implementing and managing these complex infrastructures,” Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “The announcement of Azure Service Fabric Mesh is a key step ingredient for CXOs that want to build next-generation applications on serverless infrastructure. We’ll have to check on the platform’s adoption in a few quarters from now.”

The service is currently available only in three Microsoft Azure regions at present, namely California, Virginia and the Netherlands.

Images: Microsoft