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azureazure-service-fabricreliable-actors

What type of services are best fit as Reliable Actors?

I am going through Reliable Services and Reliable Actors. I have gone through online documentation but few concepts are not clear to me.

With what I understood:

(1) Reliable Service is a programming model and comprises of Stateless and Stateful services. Reliable Service provides highly available set of classes called as: Reliable Collections.

(2) Reliable Actors is a programming model which comprises of Stateful services which utilize single thread for execution. Reliable Actors cannot be Stateless.

I want to know when to use:

(a) Stateless Service (b) Stateful Service, and (c) Reliable Actors

What type of services are best suited as single-threaded application?

Solution

  • It will depend on your application and how it is strructured I imagine that you are talking about Service Fabric Here since you just put a tag and not on the question itself.

    For the reliable services you have 2 option they are statefull services iagine this as a webpage that wants to keep the state of the client (if you are used to .net imagine this as a persistent session state of having the affinity cookie enabled on your application) basically what you are doing ti tis persisting the information that comes trough this services in order to do that you should be using reliable collections.

    Stateless services are basic api calls that will get the response from a service or do some work and return the response back. the classical case it is imagine that you have a services that will do the sum of 2 numbers it doesn't need to implement state it will do the work and retuirn the reponse back but this can be used for services that store the state outside of the service itself.

    Reliable Actors are build on top of the reliable services that are statefull they are an implementation of the actor model but built on top of the statefull reliable services. THey just add some utilities on top of the statefull services.

    you can read more details on the service fabric implementation of those model on : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-overview