This post is the first part of a brief overview of Service Fabric and how we can model Service Fabric Actors in F#. Part 1 will cover the details of how to get up and running in SF, whilst Part 2 will look at the challenges and solutions to modelling stateful actors in a OO-based framework within F#.

What is Service Fabric?

Service Fabric is a new service on Azure (currently in preview at the time of writing) which is designed to support reliable, scalable (at “hyper scale”) and maintainable distributed applications and services – with automatic support for things like replication of state across nodes, automatic failover & recovery and multi tenanting services on the same instances. It supports (currently) both stateful and stateless micro-services and actor model architectures (more on this shortly). The good thing about Service Fabric (SF) from a risk/reward point of view is that it’s…

Note: This blog post is part of the 2014 F# Advent Calendar. Be sure to check out yesterday’s Intro to Data Science post by Jon Wood!

Mailbox Processors 101

If you’ve been using F# for any reasonable length of time, you’ll have come across the MailboxProcessor, AKA the F# Agent (or Actor). Mailbox Processors are cool. They give us the ability to offload load to background processors without worrying about managing the thread that they live on (as agents silently “go to sleep” when they aren’t processing anything), and they take away the pain of locking as they ensure that only one message will be processed at a time whilst automatically queuing up backed up messages. They also allow us to visualise problems differently to how we might do so when just using a raw Task, in terms of message passing. We can partition data based by pushing them…