Offer a raw IAAS install model

[isaacabraham]

Cloud Services don't appear to be a strategic direction on Azure any more. As part of #147 we will soon have the ability to deploy an MBrace cluster as a fully managed service at an even higher level than Cloud Services, running within the Azure App Service. Not only will this lead to quicker and easier deployments (basically code free in terms of MBrace.Azure), it'll give quicker deployment times and a better way to fit MBrace into existing customer deployments.

However, App Service does have some limitations - restricted size of VM plus only 20 instances max, and no remote desktop. For this reason, I think we should also investigate an automated script e.g. Powershell DSC or similar that can install MBrace on a lightweight VM - we could even investigate both Windows and Linux running Mono.

Offering this would then provide both alternatives - a quick and easy to use MBrace cluster that runs as a fully managed service, and a "full" VM install for power users.

[alex-bogomaz]

Hello, you can also take a look at this repository:
https://github.com/alex-bogomaz/MBrace.Azure.ServiceFabric.Host

This is is working PoC of hosting MBrace cluster inside Azure Service Fabric. It has no limitations of App Service:

• you can RDP to Service Fabric nodes
• CPU stats are available to MBrace client
• any VM size and number of nodes in the cluster

[dsyme]

@isaacabraham @alex-bogomaz @eiriktsarpalis Wow.

@alex-bogomaz Could we bring this over to https://github.com/mbraceproject/, with you continuing to be admin? It's great!

[isaacabraham]

Fantastic. We've always wanted to do this - thank you very much for taking the time to do it.

We could potentially take this even further by taking advantage of SF features like on-disk caching rather than blob storage - for RDDs (cloud flow, cloud value) this could be excellent by using the built in replication and SSD support on SF. But that's for another day :)

[isaacabraham]

@eiriktsarpalis this also gets around the limitation with running as an executable on a raw VM I believe - if the mbrace application dies, the node is recycled.

[isaacabraham]

Next step for this is getting it deploying as an ARM template.

[dsyme]

@alex-bogomaz Welcome to MBrace by the way :) If you would like to add yourself as a contributor to https://github.com/mbraceproject/mbrace-docs that would be great :)

[alex-bogomaz]

@dsyme - thank you! There is nothing fancy about this, just implemented MBrace standalone worker as Service Fabric stateless service.

Could we bring this over to https://github.com/mbraceproject/, with you continuing to be admin?

sure. Thanks!

[dsyme]

@dsyme - thank you! There is nothing fancy about this, just implemented MBrace standalone worker as Service Fabric stateless service.

OK, please transfer ownership (Settings -> Transfer Ownership) and we'll make sure you are still admin on the new location here

[alex-bogomaz]

Hello, @dsyme.
Should I transfer ownership to "mbraceproject" ?
After doing this - GitHub shows:
"You don’t have the permission to create repositories on mbraceproject"

[dsyme]

@alex-bogomaz Can you make me admin on your project please? I think i can then do the transfer for you

[dsyme]

@alex-bogomaz OK, this is transferred, you should have full access now https://github.com/mbraceproject/MBrace.Azure.ServiceFabric.Host/