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Microsoft is offering a microservice solution for it's cloud platform Azure. There are two frameworks - reliable services and reliable actors.

I was wondering if a reliable actor is an independently microservice? Or form multiple actors together a microservice?

CPA
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  • Could you elaborate on why you are asking this question, and thus what is the important difference between 1 service per actor or 1 service per actor type? Do you want to deploy/scale them separately? – Mikhail Shilkov Jan 03 '16 at 13:01
  • @Mikhail I'm asking because I want to understand what exactly is a microservice in Azure Service Fabric. I want to build an application divided in microservices. I want to deploy and scale each microservice independently. So is each type of application or reliable service or reliable actor a microservice? I thought an application type consists of reliable service types or/and reliable actor types. And in that application I can deploy and scale each service or actor independently. But for what do I need more than one application type to build an whole application? – CPA Jan 03 '16 at 17:40
  • @Mikhail For example Amazon is build as a microservice application. So I thought for the Amazon example application I have 1 application type and for each service like billing or ordering I have a reliable service type or actor type. – CPA Jan 03 '16 at 17:41

2 Answers2

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In Service Fabric terms, each actor type is mapped to a service type. There may be multiple instances of this actor type, but they are all configured, deployed and updated from this service. They will all use the same partitioning schema.

Actors of different types are parts of different microservices.

Mikhail Shilkov
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Yes. Each actor can run fully independent, or we can say, an Actor must be able to work independently by design of Actor model. For that, you can create ServiceFabric with Stateful-Stateless interoperated manner on Reliable Actors API or use only one as your requirements.

For multiple actors, offical ServiceFabric samples show good examples to use Reliable Services or Reliable Actors in stateful-stateless interoperable manner.

Youngjae
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  • Yeah actors run fully independently. But my question was if an actor is an independently microservice like a reliable service? When I have 100 actors, do I have also 100 independently microservices or one microservice with 100 independently actors included? – CPA Jan 03 '16 at 12:18
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    @CPA // Actors can be an reliable service, and in your example, IMHO that's 1 microservice(application) with 100 independent actors(nodes). If you want 100 independent reliable actor, you can maintain reliable information in a shared dictionary. – Youngjae Jan 03 '16 at 12:34