API gateway/proxy pattern for microservices deployed using Azure Service Fabric

Question

After watching the BUILD conference videos for Azure Service Fabric, I\'m left imagining how this might be a good fit for our current microservice-based architecture. There is o

Answer 1

Azure Service Fabric makes it easy to implement the standard architecture for this scenario: a gateway service as a frontend for the clients to connect to and all the N backend services communicating with the front end gateway. There are a few communication API stacks available as part of Service Fabric that make it easy to communicate from clients to services and within services themselves. The communication API stacks provided by Service Fabric hide the details of discovering, connecting and retrying connections so that you can focus on the actual exchange of information. When using the Service Fabric communication APIs the services do not have to implement the mechanism of registering their names and endpoints to a specific routing service except what are the usual steps as part of creating the service itself. The communication APIs take in the service URI and partition key and automatically resolve and connect to the right service instance. This article provides a good starting point to help make a decision with regards to which communication APIs will be best suited for your particular case depending on whether you are using Reliable Actors or Reliable Services, or protocols such as HTTP or WCF, or the choice of programming language that the services are written in. At the end of the article you will find links to more detailed articles and tutorials for different communication APIs. For a tutorial on communication in Web API services see this.

Answer 2

We are using SF with a gateway pattern and about 13 services behind the gateway. We use the built in DNS service that SF provides, see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-dnsservice, this allows the internal service to service calls with known (internal to SF) DNS names, including gateway service to internal services. There are some well known asp.net core gateways (Ocelot, ProxyKit) to use, but we rolled our own. We have an external load balancer to route to multiple gateway instances in SF.