Azure Service Fabric vs Azure Service Fabric Mesh

Question

After painstakingly trying to learn and try out Azure Service Fabric, I now see 'Azure Service Fabric Mesh'. Struggling to identify the key differences.

This page states 'Service Fabric is the orchestrator that powers Service Fabric Mesh'. I am aware of the services that I can deploy to a SF cluster.

How is SF Mesh any different? Maybe just SF with additional focus on containerized apps?

Answer 1

Think about SF Mesh as the serverless Service Fabric platform (you don't have do do any cluster / VM management). It instead lets you completely focus on the application.

Read more about it here: What is Service Fabric Mesh

Answer 2

Service Fabric Mesh in my opinion is really another product compared to "just" Service Fabric. This is largely due the fact that Service Fabric gives you a set of programming models like the actor model and reliable services model for both statefull and stateless services. Service Fabric mesh does not offer these models! So that is the first fundamental choice you need to make.

Also, Service Fabric is a PaaS offering but you can also host it on-premises or in other cloud environments. Something you cannot do with Service Fabric Mesh.