Has anyone looked at Service Fabric (Microsoft tech) for things like this? That has offered stateful services for years now. I'm pretty sure it runs on Linux, and I've seen that it's Docker compatible. I know it's kinda in the same space as K8s but I don't really know the details. Would SF be able to do something like this in a similar (or better?) way?
It's complicated, because the definition of Service Fabric seems to be in flux.
The "original" Service Fabric is a high-level framework which requires invasive source code changes (you can't just drop an existing app on top of it), but gives you lots of benefits (scale, reliability etc) if you make the effort.
Recently container-based platforms - Docker, Kubernetes, etc - have come along with a different tradeoff: better compatibility with existing applications in exchange for less magical benefits. That approach is getting much more traction, and I think internally at Microsoft there is some infighting between the "Service Fabric camp" and the "Containers camp". One consequence of the infighting is that Service Fabric is extending its scope to include features like "container support". It's not clear to what extent that is done in collaboration with the "container people", or as a way to bypass them. I think they are still trying to decide whether to embrace Kubernetes, or replicate the functionality in-house. My prediction is that the container-based approach will win, but if will take time for the politics to fully play out. In the meantime things will continue to be confusing.
Bottom line: when evaluating Service Fabric, watch out for confusing and inconsistent use of the brand. It's a common pattern with large vendors - for example IBM with "Bluemix", SAP with "Hana", etc.
Okay that's about what it looked like to me too. There's only so many magic words you can throw at a tech and expect it to work together happily. Looking into it, the stateful service side of SF doesn't seem particularly compatible with the container side of it. A stateful service is a stateful SF service, and a container service is its own thing. Maybe there's a way to plug them together but unfortunately I didn't see it.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, not on Service Fabric but I have built complex stateful services on top of Service Fabric.
As zapita said, Service Fabric now handles containers but I think it is just because containers became trendy and FOMO kicked in.
Where Service Fabric is decades ahead of the container orchestration solutions is as a framework to build truly stateful services, meaning the state is entirely managed by your code through SF, not externalized in a remote disk, Redis, some DB, etc...
It offers high level primitives like reliable collections [0], as well as very low level primitives like a replicated log to implement custom replication between replicas [1]. I feel that publicly this is not advertised enough and it is unfortunate because it is a key differentiator for Service Fabric that the competitors won't have for a while, if ever because it is a completely opposite approach: containers are all about isolation, being self-contained and plateform independent while SF stateful services are deeply integrated with Service Fabric.
