[Feature] .Net 8 support timeline?

[ahhyunahn]

Hi! I am developing a new project and was wondering what the timeline would be for .net 8 support for service fabric. I am delaying majority of the code migration until November (so I can use .net 8 and also use R9 which I believe should also support .net 8 shortly after it's out), but wasn't sure what .net 8 support timeline would look like for service fabric. Do you have any rough ideas on what the timeline would look like? This will help me plan out milestones immensely, would really appreciate any insight!

---

Assignees: /cc @microsoft/service-fabric-triage

[johntyrrell]

Most likely this will be somewhere june 2024. Just like support for .NET 6 and .NET 7 came several months later.
But don't expect an official response here on github.

[kgfly]

.Net 8 preview was announced on February 21st, 2023, 8 months ago.

Why SF team cannot start new .net suport work using the preview version? Why SF always have a half year delay? Make no sense, isn't it?

[jackbond]

Actually, they'll announce they support it, then they'll announce that they found a bug and don't support it (after you've upgraded), fail to update their documentation to indicate they don't support it, and then randomly six months later, buried in a doc casually mention that they support it again.

The service fabric project managers are a joke.

[francescocristallo]

I manually installed the .Net 8 runtime on the virtual machines and it works with a new Blazor .Net 8 RC2 project.
Would be great indeed to have the official support right after .Net 8 is released.

[flower7434]

No time soon is my guess. Probably 0-6 months before .NET 6 will go out of support which is November 12, 2024. I would be surprised if it is available and working before Q2 2024.

[jackbond]

Service fabric isn't officially dead, but this sure looks like a replacement...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-dotnet-aspire-simplifying-cloud-native-development-with-dotnet-8

[mfmadsen]

My thoughts as well. But on the other hand several other projects coming out of Redmond in the last couple of years seem to all try to be the new cloud native development framework. So wonder whether Aspire will be replaced a new pet project in a year or two…

[francescocristallo]

Aspire looks great, but they left the deployment part of it to the developer, it's a local orchestrator for microservices (so far).
It will surely be enhanced with Kubernetes and Azure Container Apps deployment, plus App Service + Azure Functions for who does not use containers.

Service Fabric on the other hand has its own project service in Azure, has progressive deployment directly from Visual studio with no downtime and act as a layer on top of Virtual Machines scale sets exposing a fixed IP, essential for SaaS using custom domains for customers, that can't validate each single one of them as requested by Azure App Service and Container Apps.
Being on top of VMs it's also way more scalable compared to a managed service.
I scaled it to ~100 VM with billions of requests per hour, and it was very stable.

They overlap in many ways, but in my opinion we are not yet there for Aspire to be a 100% replacement.

[flyingosprey]

@francescocristallo , just courious: what issue will you face if you use K8S? which is very scable too.

[flower7434]

Aspire looks great, but they left the deployment part of it to the developer, it's a local orchestrator for microservices (so far). It will surely be enhanced with Kubernetes and Azure Container Apps deployment, plus App Service + Azure Functions for who does not use containers.

Service Fabric on the other hand has its own project service in Azure, has progressive deployment directly from Visual studio with no downtime and act as a layer on top of Virtual Machines scale sets exposing a fixed IP, essential for SaaS using custom domains for customers, that can't validate each single one of them as requested by Azure App Service and Container Apps. Being on top of VMs it's also way more scalable compared to a managed service. I scaled it to ~100 VM with billions of requests per hour, and it was very stable.

They overlap in many ways, but in my opinion we are not yet there for Aspire to be a 100% replacement.

I did not get this first but Aspire does not seem to be a product at all. Just a tool to help you to develop code within solutions with poor architecture.

[francescocristallo]

@francescocristallo , just courious: what issue will you face if you use K8S? which is very scable too.

No issues apart complexity, I developed another project using Kubernetes, but I found it too complex to manage with too many parts to stitch together to make it work as I wanted to.
For a small team or a single developer, I found Service Fabric with its native Visual Studio an Azure integration easier to use.
I look forward for Aspire to evolve quickly into a full alternative.

[santo2]

also like the actual sfproj support, I feel left behind as a service fabric user... they are not paying enough attention anymore to their users of a system that runs very important software.

[tscamell]

.NET 7 is EOL on 14th May 2024. Will Service Fabric support .NET 8 before this date? Or is the expectation that organisations will be required to downgrade their applications to .NET 6?

Even still, .NET 6 is EOL in Novemember 2024. It would be really helpful for the community if the Service Fabric team can publicize their roadmap for when .NET 8 will be supported on Service Fabric.

As a side note, I have updated one of our applications already to .NET 8, and it is already working successfully on a SF build of 10.0.1949.9590. However, deploying this to production would then invalidate our support until it is offically supported!

[olegsych]

We're working on shipping .NET 8 support in April. Here is the feature on our internal backlog for reference by Microsoft employees.

https://dev.azure.com/msazure/One/_workitems/edit/17509673

[tscamell]

Thank you for the update @olegsych. It's greatly appreciated

[mezzo81]

@olegsych Hi, are you sure it will be out in April? We are already very excited :-)

[jackbond]

Regardless of whether it ships in April, the complete and total lack of professionalism on the part of the Service Fabric management team is simply astounding. Giving Service Fabric customers less than six weeks to test / deploy updates to both dotnet and service fabric is a joke. It's not like the dotnet support schedule was a secret. This was blatant undeniable incompetence on the part of multiple managers, all of whom should be fired. And for anyone who thinks that's harsh, don't worry it's purely hypothetical. They've clearly already gutted the entire team and re-assigned all but one or two part time engineers. They're following the Silverlight roadmap of abandoning a project without officially announcing it.

[olegsych]

@mezzo81 I can't guarantee it will be out in April. The SDK changes are well under way and I expect them to be ready for the release we already have scheduled for April. If everything goes as planned, it will be rolled out by the end of that month, including new versions of both the runtime and the SDK packages. However, stuff happens, and releases can slip despite our best efforts when something urgent comes up.

@jackbond I understand your frustration. For what it's worth, let me assure you that Service Fabric is a critical platform and an Azure backbone running on millions of cores. We have dozens of software engineers working from multiple continents and time zones. These engineers are also on-call to provide assistance to the many Microsoft teams and external customers during their live-site incidents. As most systems of its size and critical nature, Service Fabric changes are slow to make and require careful testing to reduce the risk of wide-spread Azure outages affecting dozens of resource types. We are improving our velocity, but this will take a while. Please be patient.

[mfmadsen]

@olegsych thank you for your reply on this an your honest feedback. Great to hear this. I completely understand the precautions you need to consider with such a critical product. While the project obviously is not following normal open source product development, it is still super appreciated that you do the work on this. Thanks!

[JohnNilsson]

@olegsych indeed, thanks a bunch for that input it helps a lot!

Careful and slow changes to me is a feature, so to me "improving velocity" should not be the main priority, what we need is the ability to plan, which depends on transparency into your end of things (which your post above do provide, so again, a big thank you for that). If there is any priority conflict between increasing velocity, and increasing transparency, please opt for the latter.

[SamHard]

Giving Service Fabric customers less than six weeks to test / deploy updates...

@jackbond, for enterprise applications, you can avoid some of the "crunch" in the future if you can stick to releases of .NET that are advertised as having long-term support (LTS). You will save time (and worry) by not adopting the Standard Term Support (STS) releases of .NET.
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/dotnet-core

[desdesdes]

Even though the release notes do not specify it directly it look like .net 8 support is added to SF 10.1 CU2.

Am i correct and is it officially supported on SF 10.1 CU2?

[olegsych]

No. The 10.1 CU2 release doesn't support .NET 8. What makes you think so? I don't see it in the release notes and the following page lists only .NET 7 and .NET6 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-versions

[desdesdes]

@olegsych I installed the new SF runtime and SDK and I used the new project wizard and I chose the "Service fabric application". Then on the "Create new Service Fabric service" page which appear i chose the stateless service. I created the Stateless project which has a target framework of .net 8 (by default), as you can see in the screenshot below. Also when I hit F5 it works and hits the breakpoints in the stateless service.

[LoloActemium]

I am also waiting for .Net 8 official support.
I was able to migrate to .Net 8 and deploy our application on our test Service Fabric cluster.
Applications seems to work properly, but I will wait for official support before pushing these on production.

[olegsych]

Thanks @LoloActemium. I'm sorry about the delay, we're working on it. Our Services and Actors packages ship netstandard2.0 and should already work. Are you using the AspNetCore packages in your app?

[LoloActemium]

@olegsych Yes, I have some dependencies on AspNetCore packages.

[jackbond]

We're running Service Fabric, net80, and AspNetCore, along with actor and stateless services, and have not experienced so much as a hiccup. Is there something specific that the SF team knows doesn't work?

[olegsych]

Thanks @jackbond! No, we think that AspNetCore should work on .NET 8 with net7 binaries as well but haven't tested it specifically. We already have internal builds with net8 binaries passing the full test suite, so that's what we'll officially support in the next SDK update, in particular because .NET 7 end of support is in May.

[onerstam]

@olegsych Are there any news related to the release date of dotnet8 supporting Service Fabric SDK? I am glad to hear that is is passing the full test suite. In my ears it sounds like it could be near a public release.

[olegsych]

@onerstam We're close, but still a couple of weeks out. We're addressing unrelated problems we've discovered in the SF runtime and as soon as they are resolved the new SDKs will be out too. You can start now by building your service with the latest SDK 7.1 version. It contains net7 binaries that should work. Other have already done this and we don't know of any specific problems with the older SF SDK versions, we just didn't run our full test suite. Then upgrade to the latest SDK build with the net8 binaries once it's out.

[filipb-cariad]

Hi @olegsych Any Update on this?

[tomverhoeff]

.NET 7 is now officially out of support and Microsoft folks are (rightfully) telling everyone to upgrade. If only we could actually do this 🤷

[Dainius14]

Great! Now we're forced to use outdated .NET version. More than half a year to update one of the main dependencies of this project and it has not been done. Just want to reiterate that this whole Service Fabric thing is a joke and MS better just kill it with this kind of """development""".

[olegsych]

Hey @filipb-cariad, I'm sorry for the delay. The new ETA for the next Service Fabric public release is May 28.

[filipb-cariad]

Hey @filipb-cariad, I'm sorry for the delay. The new ETA for the next Service Fabric public release is May 28.

Thanks @olegsych!

[rvriens]

Today it is May 28.... Any news yet?
What will be the new version, 10.2?

[SierraNL]

@olegsych any update, since we're passed the ETA date?