Microsoft puts a stop to auto-updates of Azure Service Fabric 'until further notice'

Microsoft is pausing automatic upgrades for its Azure Service Fabric "until further notice" as the Windows giant reacts to the current COVID-19 situation.

The company explained that it would pull the switch last night, at the same time as it emitted version 7.1 of the technology. Customers keen for the latest and greatest can take a manual upgrade path but clusters that are set to automatically update won't receive the new toys "at this time."

That said, once things get back to normal, that 7.1 update will start to appear automatically.

A hint for when that might be can be found in the end of support dates, which were tweaked last month. Version 6.5 releases were given an extra three months, with support ending on 1 August 2020, the same as version 7.0 releases.

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform aimed at simplifying the packaging, deployment and management of microservices and containers and its roots go back nearly 20 years, with some pointing to things kicking off at Microsoft e-Home before it found its way to Azure.

While many have embraced the new shiny of Kubernetes, Service Fabric lurks behind the scenes of many Microsoft services, including Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Stack.

Version 7.1 brings with it a bunch of new features as well as previews of the future. The most notable of the latter is ephemeral OS disk support, with storage created on local virtual machines rather than as remote Azure storage. Other preview technology includes a Service Fabric Backup Explorer and a Request drain to ease node updates by removing a service from discovery and then waiting for a set duration to allow connections to drain before shutting the thing down.

The release also sees the general availability of Service Fabric Managed Identities for Service Fabric applications and support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. ®