Azure Service Fabric reliable actors vs reliable services
I am new to Azure Service Fabric and the biggest questions I have are
- When should I use reliable actors? Give me practical examples please.
- When should I use reliable services? Give me practical examples please.
Answer
Taken a look at the differences:
- State analogy : Actors work on a single instance of an object graph. Services usually have state for multiple callers.
- Scope : Actors can’t work alone, because of their size (more like objects).
- Life-cycle : Actors are only active when used, so more will fit on your available server resources
- Concurrency : Actors enforce single threaded access
- State : Actors just modify the aggregate, services work on sets so often use transactions on sets for ACID behavior.
- Communication : Actors communicate through channels provided by the platform. Services may choose otherwise.
- Access : Actors in the cluster can’t be reached from the outside by default. You’ll probably need a Service that provides access.
Samples when to use an actor:
- For every user of your mobile app you could have one actor.
- For every thermostat that sends information to your application you could have one actor.
- For every customer of your e-commerce site, you could have one shopping-basket actor.
Create a service in the cases that you are probably used to. Create a reliable service that provides a service for multiple users at once. For example a weather service.