Swift Service Fabric Deployments with PowerShell

A few weeks ago I had the great privilege of presenting a 60 minute breakout session at Microsoft Ignite | The Tour in Sydney. It was thrilling to have over 200 people registered to see my topic “Seamless Deployments with Azure Service Fabric”, especially in the massive Convention Centre.

In the session I demonstrated the self-healing capabilities of Service Fabric by introducing a bug in the code and then attempting a rolling upgrade. It was impressive to see how Service Fabric detected the bug after the first node was upgraded and then immediately started rolling it back.

As you can imagine, it took a fair amount of practice to get the demo smooth and functioning within the tight time limits of the average audience attention span. (In fact, I had to learn how to tweak both the cluster and the application health check settings to shorten the interval – perhaps the subject of another blog post!) Naturally this also entailed frequently “resetting” the environment so that I could start over when things didn’t go quite as planned, or if I wanted to reset the version number. If you’ve ever worked with Service Fabric before you would know that deployments from Visual Studio (or Azure DevOps) can take a while; and undeploying an application from Service Fabric manually in the portal is painful!