Website under construction

Figure 3-1:
Diagram showing the three pillars for an application platform 
First, you can secure the fabric to protect virtual machines (VMs) and enhance existing apps 
immediately with Windows Server 2016, by taking advantage of enhanced security and management 
features in the fabric. For example, you can use shielded VMs to help secure your critical applications 
to run only on trusted fabrics. You can limit administrator access to specific tasks by using Just 
Enough Administration (JEA) and specific time limits with Just-in-Time (JIT) administration. 
More info For more detail about shielded VMs, JEA, and JIT administration, read the discussion in 
Chapter 4. 
Second, you can containerize existing apps and move your traditional applications into a modern 
DevOps environment with little or no code changes. You can gain benefits such as consistency across 
development, test, and production by using the same tooling, which facilitates rapid deployments, 
continuous integration, and continuous delivery, all with better security. You can use containers to 
gain control and consistency by enabling apps that you can deploy on-premises, to any cloud, or in a 
hybrid architecture across clouds. For an additional layer of isolation, you can deploy your app in a 
Hyper-V Container, which packages the same container image in a Hyper-V Container, which uses the 
hypervisor to provide an additional level of isolation. 
Third, you can build cloud-native and hybrid apps. Windows Server 2016 is suited to Agile methods 
for building cloud-native applications with microservices architectures. With Nano Server’s 
deployment model, you can build offline customized operating system (OS) images highly optimized 
for your application, providing a fast-booting, tiny OS that achieves higher density while exposing a 
reduced attack surface. 
Microsoft wants you to create your best app, whether it’s written by using the Microsoft .Net 
Framework or open-source frameworks such as .Net Core and Node.JS. Using proven Microsoft Azure 
Service Fabric technology along with Windows Server 2016, you can build always-on, scalable, and 
distributed applications and run them in Azure, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment. You can 
combine the benefits of containers with Nano Server, Service Fabric, and the proven Windows Server 
platform to achieve business agility with cloud apps. 
Ultimately, the choice will depend on each customer’s needs and the application being developed, but 
Windows Server 2016 offers multiple options with which you can move forward into a cloud-ready 
infrastructure with minimal investment. 
Microservices 
When it came to applications built for the web, we generally moved away from traditional n-tier 
architectures toward Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This was no easy task and put a lot of 
customers off rewriting their applications. SOA breaks down an application into components, which 
communicate with one another via some communication protocol. 
It could be said that SOA is the forefather of microservices, given that microservices breaks down even 
further to smaller components that each live and run as an individual process and communicate with 
one another in a language-agnostic fashion. 

---

89 
CHAPTER 3 | Application platform 
Microservices foster more rapid development versus SOA. This is because the components that 
dictate a microservices model are far smaller than SOA. If you need to make a change to a component 
in microservices, you can develop, update, and deploy rapidly without affecting the operation of the 
other components. Each component is technically an independent contractor, so each has its own way 
of doing things and separate way of communicating. Because all of these components share a single 
communication model, this makes it simpler to improve parts of an application built on microservices. 
Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes building microservices or translating your 
application into microservices architecture easy to do, while also giving you the means to manage the 
full lifecycle of an application. It is available both on-premises and in Azure as Azure Service Fabric. 
You can write an application once and deploy it on-premises or to Azure with no API change using, all 
while using common development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio. 
Service Fabric powers many Microsoft services today, including Azure SQL Database, Azure 
DocumentDB, Cortana, Power BI, Intune, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT, Skype for Business, and many 
other core Azure services. All the learnings from running these solutions have been incorporated into 
the Service Fabric product and will ensure that if your applications need a highly reliable and scalable 
solution, this is your microservices platform of choice.