Steve Spencer's Blog

I am using Azure Service Fabric to host my application but I’ve deployed it on premises using a 3 machine cluster (running version Microsoft.Azure.ServiceFabric.WindowsServer.5.1.156.9590). It was easy to deploy and I only needed to run PowerShell on 1 of the nodes to configure up all 3. I followed the instructions here.

From Visual Studio I deployed my application which consisted of a number of stateless services and a WCF service. When everything is running in the cluster it all works fine but I wanted to access the WCF service from outside of the cluster. The first issue was that the actual address of the service is not known but you can see the address if you look at the Service Fabric Explorer of the cluster. Navigating through to the application on one of the nodes returns the url of the service e.g.

net.tcp://192.168.56.122:8081/4f341989-ec72-4cd5-8778-6e11e01dc727/968d5932-935a-4773-b83b-fa99f59d9073-131148669247596041

You don’t want to use this url directly as it could change depending upon the configuration of your cluster and the health of each of the nodes. Service Fabric provides a mechanism for discovering the address of the end point using the Service Resolver. If you are running in the cluster then you can use the default resolver and this will return the url of the end point which you can connect to. However, when you are outside of the cluster you need to tell the resolver where to look for the cluster.

Again if you look at the Service Fabric Explorer you can find out the ports used in the cluster e.g.

<ClientConnectionEndpoint Port="19000" />
<LeaseDriverEndpoint Port="9026" />
<ClusterConnectionEndpoint Port="19001" />
<HttpGatewayEndpoint Port="19080" Protocol="http" />
<ServiceConnectionEndpoint Port="9027" />
<ApplicationEndpoints StartPort="20001" EndPort="20031" />
<EphemeralEndpoints StartPort="20032" EndPort="20062" /> 

The example here shows how to connect to the resolver in an Azure hosted environment.

ServicePartitionResolver resolver = new  ServicePartitionResolver("mycluster.cloudapp.azure.com:19000", "mycluster.cloudapp.azure.com:19001");

This example provides a list of endpoints to try on both ports 19000 & 19001. Mapping this to my environment I used the ip address of the node on which I ran the PowerShell which also is the node that displays the Service Fabric Explorer. I also needed to know the application name in order for the resolver to find the end point I was after. The code below is part of a console application that attempts to call a WCF service from outside of the cluster. I’ve highlighted the service name and addresses I’ve used

string uri = "fabric:/ServiceFabricApp/FileStoreServiceStateless";
Binding binding = WcfUtility.CreateTcpClientBinding();
// Create a partition resolver
var serviceResolver = new ServicePartitionResolver(new string[] { "192.168.56.122:19000" , "192.168.56.122:19001" });
 
// create a  WcfCommunicationClientFactory object.
var clientFactory = new WcfCommunicationClientFactory
                    (clientBinding: binding, servicePartitionResolver: serviceResolver);
 
var client = new ServicePartitionClient>(
                    clientFactory,
                    new Uri(uri), partitionKey: Microsoft.ServiceFabric.Services.Client.ServicePartitionKey.Singleton);
 
var result = client.InvokeWithRetry(svc => svc.Channel.GetDocuments("Document", "1000848776", null));

The good thing about this is that everything seems to be working and and I’ve learnt more about service fabric now