Utilizing FabricClient to Create Services

One lesser known feature of Service Fabric is the ability to create applications and services at runtime. This can be powerful for instance if the application is multi-tenant or you want to spin up background worker tasks.

To get started, we can first create a new Service Fabric project. In this project we will have to application types which will create instances of stateless services. In order to create a new instance of the fabric client we can simple call the following code below.

using System.Fabric;

// Further down in our constructor.
var fabricClient = new FabricClient();

The application definitions essentially setup application details like the application path (for example fabric:/DeviceSimulation/Devices), the application type name, the version and any additional properties we want to add to the applicaiton. We keep track of these values inside an ApplicationDescription instance object. To create a new instance of the application from the fabric client we will call the following code.

var applicationDescription = new ApplicationDescription(new Uri($"fabric:/DeviceSimulation/Devices"), "DeviceSimulationType", "1.0.0", new NameValueCollection());
await fabricClient.ApplicationManager.CreateApplicationAsync(applicationDescription);

Then we move on to creating instances of our stateless service. This has a StatelessServiceDescription class (similar to ApplicationDescription above) that has more properties, but describes the stateless service definition.

serviceDescriptions = new List<StatelessServiceDescription>();
var statelessServiceDescription = new StatelessServiceDescription()
{
    ApplicationName = new Uri($"fabric:/DeviceSimulation/Devices"),
    ServiceName = new Uri($"fabric:/DeviceSimulation/Devices/{serviceName}"),
    ServiceTypeName = "DeviceSimulatorType",
    PartitionSchemeDescription = new SingletonPartitionSchemeDescription(),
    InitializationData = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(json),
    InstanceCount = 1,
};
serviceDescriptions.Add(serviceName, statelessServiceDescription);

// Further below we create the instances of the service.
foreach (var serivceDescription in serviceDescriptions)
{
    await fabricClient.ServiceManager.CreateServiceAsync(serivceDescription);
}

So for every item in the serviceDescriptions list we will instantiate a new service that has those details passed along to it (inside InitializationData).

There are a lot of advantages here because services can scale out more than applications or containers. One major disadvantage though, is that we would need to attach to a process in order to debug the child stateless service as Visual Studio loses track of processes that are instantiated at run time.

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