At the Microsoft Ignite event, the Azure Service Fabric team unveiled two new Technical Customer Profiles! Let's dig in!

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ABBYY is a software company that provides optical character recognition, document capture, and language software for PCs and mobile devices. More than 40 million people from over 200 countries use ABBYY products, technologies, solutions, and services.

The team knew that modern technologies and a microservices Architecture could ease many of their issues, but they couldn't afford to rewrite their Lingvo Live application all at once. They wanted to take an evolutionary approach: host the application as is, gradually improve it over time, refactor the old code piece by piece, and move it to the new platform.

Service Fabric was a perfect fit for the ABBYY team's evolutionary approach. It provided the flexible, scalable compute resources they wanted along with an SDK for microservices and state management. Service Fabric also supports containers and guest executables, something the team found especially useful when migrating their existing services and components to the new environment.

Read more details and an explanation of their architecture:

• Service Fabric Customer Profile: ABBYY

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Based in Stockholm, Sweden, FunRock is a fast-growing developer and publisher of mobile strategy games that are uniquely customized for markets primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. The story lines, environments, sounds, music, graphics, and support are all adapted to the target region's culture and language, where FunRock has local knowledge and presence. The team consists of experienced game developers who have created successful game titles in the past.

In MMO strategy gaming, the greatest technical challenge is concurrency. Handling up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent players requires a specialized architectural approach. FunRock's latest title, Etihad Al Abtal ("Heroes United"), takes place in a desert wasteland where the Arabic nations unite against a common enemy.

A traditional back-end architecture usually handles this kind of load using shared databases, load balancers, and caches. Planning and managing an architecture like this takes time and resources away from product and feature development. FunRock was motivated to try a different approach to MMO and turned to Service Fabric Reliable Actors, an implementation of the Actor design pattern.

The heart of the MMO architecture for Heroes United is a microservices-based internal layer, which is not open for communication from outside. Its services manage the game worlds, assets, and player services. Services with exposed endpoints are placed behind a DMZ in the communication layer. The back end hosts common services used for backup and logging. The logging service receives and handles all logs except those coming from Service Fabric itself. The backup service performs backups of all stateful actor services on a given interval and manages restores from previous backups.

Read more details and an explanation of their architecture:

• Service Fabric Customer Profile: FunRock

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AzureCAT (Customer Advisory Team) works closely with the Azure Service Fabric team to identify our customer engagements that we want to highlight. From AzureCAT, Anna Forse and I (Ed Price) help coordinate that effort with Nanette Ray acting as our Technical Writer and Development Editor, with RoAnn Cobisier acting as our Copy Editor, and then I also publish the articles. Mark Fussell and Matt Snider review our content for the Service Fabric team and help us find key engagements.

Find all our customer architectures here:

• AzureCAT – Technical Customer Profiles

Azure CAT Guidance

"Hands-on solutions, with our heads in the Cloud!"

-  Ninja Ed