Orchestrating local development or testing environments with Azure Service Fabric

Question

After playing around a little bit with Azure Service Fabric, and watching the streams from BUILD, I'm a bit curious if there are anything the pipeline around tooling for orchestrating environments for more complex services.

Say I build a service "Service1" which calls upon actors and services in "Service2" and "Service3"; any developer checking out the "Service1" repository to perform changes must also not only check out "Service2" and "Service3", but also build them and deploy them to the Service Fabric before being able to properly test his/her changes within "Service1". Comparing this to for instance Compose for Docker (I'm aware that Azure Service Fabric isn't a container-style infrastructure as such, but just as an example), where you can create a manifest describing your service and its dependencies. Then you can easily bootstrap the entire environment necessary to run and test your service.

This would also be useful for automated testing or even QA of your service, where you can spin up a new cluster and deploy your service - and its dependencies - and run actual live testing on your changes before you start a production deployment.

This might be a question or proposal better suited as product feedback, but it would be interesting to have some more input on this before formulating it into a suggestion. I'm not deeply familiar with Compose, which I used as an example - nor with Azure Service Fabric, so there might be better solutions to the problem out there.

Answer 1

Pulling down application packages and deploying them to your cluster (whether local, test, prod, whatever) actually is a fairly simple thing as long as you have a central repository of application packages similar to what Compose does with Docker Hub. In other words, the capability is there but we don't yet have a centralized place like Docker Hub to store application packages - and you'd have to do a little scripting to pull things down yourself. So for now yes you would need to check out the repo that has your dependencies and build (or inject mocks for local testing).

On that note, please do post this suggestion to our product feedback!