This is Part 1 of a Two-part series. See Web and Worker Roles: What do I do now? Part 2
For those of you who may not have noticed PaaS V2 (Azure Service Fabric) was announced a while back. The familiar PaaS V1 Cloud Services based Web and Worker Role architecture is now legacy. They aren’t going away, but Microsoft will not be spending any more development effort on them. PaaS V2 is the future.
So what do I do now? Of course I can keep my Web and Worker Role based applications running as-is or start to migrate to one of two newer architectures:
The traditional architecture of Cloud Services that has been with us since the beginning of Azure normally follows the pattern of a web farm implemented as a multi-instance Web Role which passes data through an Azure Storage Queue (and often) Azure Blobs and/or Tables to a pool of one or more Worker Roles used to do background processing.
One natural migration path is to replace the Web Role with a WebApp and the background Worker role with a WebJob.
Azure Service Fabric (currently in Technical Preview) is a newer micro-service-oriented architecture that was designed for hyper-scalability. Many of the Microsoft first-party applications such as SQL Database, IoT Hubs, Cortana, and Document DB are built on this architecture.
If you expect to build the kind of application that will scale to support thousands or even millions of users Service Fabric may be for you. Otherwise investigate moving to a WebApps/WebJobs architecture.
Bill
Cloudy In Nashville 