We describe Service Fabric (SF), Microsoft's distributed platform for building, running, and maintaining microservice applications in the cloud. SF has been running in production for 10+ years, powering many critical services at Microsoft. This paper outlines key design philosophies in SF. We then adopt a bottom-up approach to describe low-level components in its architecture, focusing on modular use and support for strong semantics like fault-tolerance and consistency within each component of SF. We discuss lessons learned, and present experimental results from production data.

Cloud SQL Server is a relational database system designed to scale-out to cloud computing workloads. It uses Microsoft SQL Server as its core. To scale out, it uses a partitioned database on a shared-nothing system architecture. Transactions are constrained to execute on one partition, to avoid the need for two-phase commit. The database is replicated for high availability using a custom primary-copy replication scheme. It currently serves as the storage engine for Microsoft's Exchange Hosted Archive and SQL Azure.

Cloud SQL Server is an Internet scale relational database service which is currently used by Microsoft delivered services and also offered directly as a fully relational database service known as "SQL Azure". One of the principle design objectives in Cloud SQL Server was to provide true SQL support with full ACID transactions within controlled scale "consistency domains" and provide a relaxed degree of consistency across consistency domains that would be viable to clusters of 1,000's of nodes. In this paper, we describe the implementation of Cloud SQL Server with an emphasis on this core design principle.