Service Fabric cheap cluster options

Question

What is the cheapest possible vm sku you can run a service fabric cluster on in Azure?

I just tried to create a 1 node cluster using DS1_V2 and got a warning "Not enough disk space". Then I tried DS2_V2 Promo and the warning goes away.

It cost 142.85 USD and you need 5 of them. So that will be a total cost of 714.25 $ month plus usage.

Is the minimum cost for a service fabric cluster really around 1.000 USD a month.

What are the minimum requirement for running it on premise?

Is it possible to deploy 1 virtual machine in azure, install service fabric on that and deploy to that. (I know that wont scale, be fault tolerant etc)

Answer 1

For a production environment, you are correct you will need at least 5x D class machines for a Service fabric cluster.

For a QA environment you can set up a 3 node cluster with a Bronze durability level which should bring down the costs a bit.

For a development environment, you could use the Service Fabric Local Cluster manager which allows you to emulate a 1 Node or a 5 Node environment on your local machine and recently there is a new option in Azure to create and run a 1 Node cluster - see below.

As for capacity planning, you can find some good guidelines in the official docs.

For production workloads

• The recommended VM SKU is Standard D3 or Standard D3_V2 or equivalent with a minimum of 14 GB of local SSD.
• The minimum supported use VM SKU is Standard D1 or Standard D1_V2 or equivalent with a minimum of 14 GB of local SSD.
• Partial core VM SKUs like Standard A0 are not supported for production workloads
• Standard A1 SKU is specifically not supported for production workloads for performance reasons.