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.

The paper compares VoATM and VoIP in terms of their suitability for carrying voice traffic over DSL. ATM is currently the preferred protocol due to its built-in QoS mechanisms. Through simulations, we show that IP QoS mechanisms can also be used to achieve comparable performance for voice traffic over DSL. Our performance metrics are the end-to-end delay of voice packets across the DSL access network and the bandwidth requirements of a voice call. We also propose an implicit signaling mechanism to provide admission control for individual voice calls over DSL. We implement a simulation model that uses our mechanism and perform simulations to verify its effectiveness We conclude that by incorporating appropriate QoS mechanisms and implicit signaling, it is possible to achieve performance for VoIP comparable to that provided by ATM. In this case, the ubiquity of IP makes it a very attractive candidate for future deployments of VoDSL.