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First published by MikeMcKeown-Aditi Cloud Architect (aMicrosoft Partne)
When: 17 Mar 2010 6:22 PM
Last revision by Carsten Siemens (eMicrosoft Partne)
When: 31 May 2013 3:41 AM
Revisions: 15
Comments: 9

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Windows Server AppFabric: Introduction and Features

Health Monitoring and Troubleshooting Services
Workflow Instance Management
Scaling-Out Distributed Applications
Simplified Configuration Tooling
Scripting Management Tasks
- Useful Links

For IT Professionals, the AppFabric Service and Workflow Management is the way to run and manage .NET 4 Windows Workflow (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. If your project uses .NET 4 WF or WCF, the Service and Workflow Management features of AppFabric will provide significant improvements in the following areas:

Health Monitoring and Troubleshooting Services
Workflow Instance Management
Scaling-Out Distributed Applications
Simplified Configuration Tooling
Scripting Management Tasks

We do this by extending the reach of the existing IIS Manager tools to cover managing, controlling, monitoring and troubleshooting middle tier services that encapsulate business logic and support the web tier. If you are not familiar with IIS Manager, you can learn all about it here.

Health Monitoring and Troubleshooting Services

An intuitive monitoring dashboard quickly shows you the health of all of your services. If there are problems, the dashboard allows you to drill down into the cause of the issue. All of the health data for WCF and WF services is generated automatically, without the need for any developer code.

Workflow Instance Management

The monitoring dashboard also gives you control over your long running workflow instances. You can centrally issue commands against long running workflow instances (suspend, resume, cancel or terminate) running on one or more machines in your environment.

Scaling-Out Distributed Applications

AppFabric allows scaling of WF and WCF services across multiple hosts. Host instances can be dynamically added or removed allowing you to respond to fluctuations in demand for capacity.

Simplified Configuration Tooling

AppFabric provides easy access to common settings for WF and WCF services. For example, AppFabric allows you to set the throttle settings on a service, change the verbosity of health monitoring data and configure a WF host in a few clicks.

Scripting Management Tasks

We made sure that functionality in AppFabric is accessible through PowerShell script. This allows you to automate common tasks. For example, archiving last month’s monitoring data can be accomplished with one PowerShell command. If you are new to PowerShell, you can learn more about it here.