Microsoft, the Windows giant, reacted to the COVID-19 crisis by stopping automatic updates for Azure Service Fabric until further notice.
The company announced that it had unplugged the updates on April 20, 2020, precisely at the same time when it released version 7.1 of the technology. The company further talks about customers who are keen on the latest upgrade and confirmed that they can avail of the manual upgrade path; however, clusters that are set to update automatically will not receive the new toys at this point in time.
Once the situation gets back to normal, the 7.1 version update will begin to appear automatically.
Its hint can be found looking at the end of its support dates that were tweaked last month. Version 6.5 releases had three months extra with August 1, 2020, being the end date, and the same goes with version 7.0 releases.
More about Azure Service Fabric
Known as the distributed systems platform, the Azure Service Fabric is focused on simplifying packaging, management of microservices, deployment, and containers. Its roots date back to around two decades, when things were kicking off at Microsoft e-Home before it made its way to Azure.
Several companies have embraced the new essence of Kubernetes, while Service Fabric is somewhere close behind many Microsoft Services, such as Azure Stack and Azure Cosmos DB.
Features of the new version
Version 7.1 of Azure offers several new features along with the previews of the future. The most significant aspect of the latter is the ephemeral OS disk support with storage developed on local virtual machines in place of remote Azure storage. Another preview technology includes a Service Fabric Backup Explorer and a Request drain to simplify node updates by getting rid of service from discovery and then waiting for a set duration to permit connections to drain before shutting it down.
