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Tutorial: Deploy an application with CI/CD to a Service Fabric cluster

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This tutorial is part four of a series and describes how to set up continuous integration and deployment for an Azure Service Fabric application using Azure Pipelines. An existing Service Fabric application is needed, the application created in Build a .NET application is used as an example.

In part three of the series, you learn how to:

  • Add source control to your project
  • Create a build pipeline in Azure Pipelines
  • Create a release pipeline in Azure Pipelines
  • Automatically deploy and upgrade an application

In this tutorial series you learn how to:

Prerequisites

Before you begin this tutorial:

Download the Voting sample application

If you did not build the Voting sample application in part one of this tutorial series, you can download it. In a command window, run the following command to clone the sample app repository to your local machine.

git clone https://github.com/Azure-Samples/service-fabric-dotnet-quickstart

Prepare a publish profile

Now that you've created an application and have deployed the application to Azure, you're ready to set up continuous integration. First, prepare a publish profile within your application for use by the deployment process that executes within Azure Pipelines. The publish profile should be configured to target the cluster that you've previously created. Start Visual Studio and open an existing Service Fabric application project. In Solution Explorer, right-click the application and select Publish....

Choose a target profile within your application project to use for your continuous integration workflow, for example Cloud. Specify the cluster connection endpoint. Check the Upgrade the Application checkbox so that your application upgrades for each deployment in Azure DevOps. Click the Save hyperlink to save the settings to the publish profile and then click Cancel to close the dialog box.

Push profile

Share your Visual Studio solution to a new Azure DevOps Git repo

Share your application source files to a project in Azure DevOps so you can generate builds.

Create a new local Git repo for your project by selecting Add to Source Control -> Git on the status bar in the lower right-hand corner of Visual Studio.

In the Push view in Team Explorer, select the Publish Git Repo button under Push to Azure DevOps.

Screenshot of the Team Explorer - Synchronization window in Visual Studio. The Publish to Git Repo button is highlighted under Push to Azure DevOps.

Verify your email and select your account in the Azure DevOps Domain drop-down. Enter your repository name and select Publish repository.

Screenshot of the Push to Azure DevOps settings with the Email, Account, Repository name, and Publish Repository button highlighted.

Publishing the repo creates a new project in your account with the same name as the local repo. To create the repo in an existing project, click Advanced next to Repository name and select a project. You can view your code on the web by selecting See it on the web.

Configure Continuous Delivery with Azure Pipelines

An Azure Pipelines build pipeline describes a workflow that is composed of a set of build steps that are executed sequentially. Create a build pipeline that produces a Service Fabric application package, and other artifacts, to deploy to a Service Fabric cluster. Learn more about Azure Pipelines build pipelines.

An Azure Pipelines release pipeline describes a workflow that deploys an application package to a cluster. When used together, the build pipeline and release pipeline execute the entire workflow starting with source files to ending with a running application in your cluster. Learn more about Azure Pipelines release pipelines.

Create a build pipeline

Open a web browser and navigate to your new project at: https://<myaccount>.visualstudio.com/Voting/Voting%20Team/_git/Voting.

Select the Pipelines tab, then Builds, then click New Pipeline.

New Pipeline

Select Azure Repos Git as source, Voting Team project, Voting Repository, and master Default branch for manual and scheduled builds. Then click Continue.

Select repo

In Select a template, select the Azure Service Fabric application template and click Apply.

Choose build template

In Tasks, enter "Hosted VS2017" as the Agent pool.

Select tasks

Under Triggers, enable continuous integration by checking Enable continuous integration. Within Branch filters, the Branch specification defaults to master. Select Save and queue to manually start a build.

Select triggers

Builds also trigger upon push or check-in. To check your build progress, switch to the Builds tab. Once you verify that the build executes successfully, define a release pipeline that deploys your application to a cluster.

Create a release pipeline

Select the Pipelines tab, then Releases, then + New pipeline. In Select a template, select the Azure Service Fabric Deployment template from the list and then Apply.

Choose release template

Select Tasks->Environment 1 and then +New to add a new cluster connection.

Add cluster connection

In the Add new Service Fabric Connection view select Certificate Based or Microsoft Entra ID authentication. Specify a connection name of "mysftestcluster" and a cluster endpoint of "tcp://mysftestcluster.southcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com:19000" (or the endpoint of the cluster you are deploying to).

For certificate-based authentication, add the Server certificate thumbprint of the server certificate used to create the cluster. In Client certificate, add the base-64 encoding of the client certificate file. See the help pop-up on that field for info on how to get that base-64 encoded representation of the certificate. Also add the Password for the certificate. You can use the cluster or server certificate if you don't have a separate client certificate.

For Microsoft Entra credentials, add the Server certificate thumbprint of the server certificate used to create the cluster and the credentials you want to use to connect to the cluster in the Username and Password fields.

Click Add to save the cluster connection.

Next, add a build artifact to the pipeline so the release pipeline can find the output from the build. Select Pipeline and Artifacts->+Add. In Source (Build definition), select the build pipeline you created previously. Click Add to save the build artifact.

Add artifact

Enable a continuous deployment trigger so that a release is automatically created when the build completes. Click the lightning icon in the artifact, enable the trigger, and click Save to save the release pipeline.

Enable trigger

Select + Release -> Create a Release -> Create to manually create a release. You can monitor the release progress in the Releases tab.

Verify that the deployment succeeded and the application is running in the cluster. Open a web browser and navigate to http://mysftestcluster.southcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com:19080/Explorer/. Note the application version, in this example it is "1.0.0.20170616.3".

Commit and push changes, trigger a release

To verify that the continuous integration pipeline is functioning by checking in some code changes to Azure DevOps.

As you write your code, your changes are automatically tracked by Visual Studio. Commit changes to your local Git repository by selecting the pending changes icon (Pending changes icon shows a pencil and a number.) from the status bar in the bottom right.

On the Changes view in Team Explorer, add a message describing your update and commit your changes.

Commit all

Select the unpublished changes status bar icon (Unpublished changes) or the Sync view in Team Explorer. Select Push to update your code in Azure Pipelines.

Push changes

Pushing the changes to Azure Pipelines automatically triggers a build. When the build pipeline successfully completes, a release is automatically created and starts upgrading the application on the cluster.

To check your build progress, switch to the Builds tab in Team Explorer in Visual Studio. Once you verify that the build executes successfully, define a release pipeline that deploys your application to a cluster.

Verify that the deployment succeeded and the application is running in the cluster. Open a web browser and navigate to http://mysftestcluster.southcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com:19080/Explorer/. Note the application version, in this example it is "1.0.0.20170815.3".

Screenshot of the Voting app in Service Fabric Explorer running in a browser window. The app version "1.0.0.20170815.3" is highlighted.

Update the application

Make code changes in the application. Save and commit the changes, following the previous steps.

Once the upgrade of the application begins, you can watch the upgrade progress in Service Fabric Explorer:

Screenshot of the Voting app in Service Fabric Explorer. The Status message "Upgrading", and an "Upgrade in Progress" message are highlighted.

The application upgrade may take several minutes. When the upgrade is complete, the application will be running the next version. In this example "1.0.0.20170815.4".

Screenshot of the Voting app in Service Fabric Explorer running in a browser window. The updated app version "1.0.0.20170815.4" is highlighted.

Next steps

In this tutorial, you learned how to:

  • Add source control to your project
  • Create a build pipeline
  • Create a release pipeline
  • Automatically deploy and upgrade an application

Advance to the next tutorial:

Set up monitoring and diagnostics for the application