After a couple of months of private preview, Microsoft’s Azure Service Fabric Mesh is now publicly in preview. With this, you could use Service Fabric without managing infrastructure such as VMs, storage, or networking.

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform to build and manage scalable microservices and container-based applications for Windows and Linux. Service Fabric is a foundational technology powering core Azure infrastructure, as well as other Microsoft cloud services such as Skype for Business, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Dynamics 365, and many more.

Up until now, Service Fabric required you to create and manage the clusters and their nodes using virtual machine scale sets.
The public preview of Service Fabric Mesh is available in three Azure regions – US West, US East, and Europe West. Microsoft has plans to expand the service to other Azure regions in the coming months.

The company has also released Service Fabric Mesh tooling in Visual Studio 2017 to help you build applications.

Previously, you had to describe your Service Fabric applications with XML manifests, which was complex and tedious. The new resource-based application uses lightweight YAML files to describe your application and the resources that make it up, making it easier to specify and modify these resources.

The tools also help you scaffold applications, debug microservices, and publish your application to Mesh.