How would I sensibly convert an Azure Cloud Service with long initialization into an Azure Service Fabric service?

Question

Currently we run resource intensive processing as a Cloud Service with a web role. The service package only contains frequently changing .NET assemblies. There's also a dependency onto a C++ DCOM server which is about one gigabytes of code and data total. That DCOM server is packed into an archive and put into blob storage. When a role instance starts its OnStart() downloads the archive, unpacks it into local filesystem and registers the DCOM server, the .NET code then consumes the DCOM server.

It works but scaling is quite slow - it takes about two-five minutes between a scale-out operation is sent to Azure Management Service and role OnStart() runs (and then it takes about one more minute to run OnStart() ). I heard that HyperV containers are nearly magic for scaling out - they scale nearly instantly. I also heard that Azure Service Fabric uses containers to host service instances. So I assume that Azure Service Fabric could be used to resolve our issues with slow scaling.

The question is - what can be done to that long running code in OnStart() . Having each service instance run that code kind of defeats containers - they would scale fast, then get stuck with that initialization code.

Can Azure Service Fabric do something like dual-phase initialization where something equivalent to OnStart() first runs in a single instance while the service is being deployed and then a fully initialized instance is just "cloned" quickly to scale the service out on demand? Can it do anything better for the described scenario?

Answer 1

在Service Fabric中，依赖关系理想地作为应用程序包的一部分（可选地进行容器化）来承载，这意味着它们在尝试启动实际服务之前将被复制到盒子中 - 此外，应用程序映像已经在Service Fabric集群，这意味着它通常在本地或至少从同一组计算机（而不是从网络或存储帐户所在的任何位置）复制。