What Is the Azure Fabric Controller?

The Fabric Controller (FC) is an in-house orchestration component that is part of Azure’s architecture. It manages Azure’s physical infrastructure—servers, storage, network, clusters—as well as health and density of virtualized resources.

Here is how it works:

• Monitors the status and well-being of hardware (servers, disks, cooling, etc.) to ensure the hardware is operating properly and if it fails to take a corrective action.
• Determines resource placement of virtual machines and services based on load at the time, available capacity and policy.
• Responsible for managing reboots, patching, updating OS, and failovers so applications remain up in the event that the underlying hardware and/or components fail.
• Maintains the organization of clusters of machines while following up with software agents on the servers to report back and to follow.

Considerations for Developers and Architects

• Design for Failures: Although Azure has a resilient underlying fabric, you will still need to design your applications to deal with transient failures (the hardware will fail at some point—you'll have to deal with it and account for it in your design). Implement redundancy, fault domains, and retry logic.
• Accept Performance Variance: From time to time, there will be performance variances that you will not be able to explain immediately. To an extent, this can occur because the FC will move workloads around from server to cluster, which will affect performance and SLAs. Similarly, your performance-sensitive components will have to adjust for performance variances, so you will have to factor this into your design.
• Still Monitor: As much to monitor it may seem, application-level monitoring is still required at some level to capture what you care about—your metrics—not just the infrastructure health.
• Be Aware of Costs: The FC is quite efficient at consuming resources, however, you still need to right-size your instances, use the appropriate VM's, and be mindful of pricing zones. Just don't assume everything will always be optimal.

The Fabric Controller will not be visible. You typically won't find it in your dashboards. It is present everywhere. The Fabric Controller is the building block for resiliency, scaling, and efficiency within Azure. If you are going to build on Azure, understanding what it does offers you a better understanding of what to expect and how to build smarter systems.

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