AppFabric

AppFabric is a set of middleware technologies for Windows Server, released by Microsoft. It consists of two main feature areas: AppFabric Hosting and AppFabric Caching. Microsoft support for these will end in November 2017. There are recommendations for migrating Application Cache, Hosting, Management and Monitoring in a blog article. A comparable newer product is the on premise variant of Azure Service Fabric.

AppFabric Hosting features provide a way for users to deploy and manage Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) workflows that are hosted in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. AppFabric includes an extension of the Internet Information Services management tool that enables an IIS administrator to monitor the performance of services and workflows. There is also a set of Windows PowerShell commands to manage persistence, hosting, and monitoring tasks.

AppFabric Hosting features provide three main capabilities for services:

Persistence allows Windows Workflow Foundation services to save the state of long running workflows to a database. This makes Workflow services more durable in the event of deliberate suspensions or unexpected hardware failures.

Hosting facilitates the management of WCF and WF services within IIS and the Windows Process Activation service (WAS).

Monitoring stores and correlates service events in a backend database. This facilitates analysis and troubleshooting of the coordination of multiple WCF and WF services.

AppFabric Caching is an in-memory, distributed cache that runs on one or more on-premises servers to provide a performance and scalability boost for .NET Framework applications. AppFabric caches store data in key-value pairs using the physical memory across multiple servers. The service presents that memory as a single resource. Caches are configured and managed through a set of Windows PowerShell commands.

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