Should actors/services be split into multiple projects?

Question

I'm testing out Azure Service Fabric and started adding a lot of actors and services to the same project - is this okay to do or will I lose any of service fabric features as fail overs, scaleability etc?

Answer 1

My preference here is clearly 1 actor/1 service = 1 project. The big win with a platform like this is that it allows you to write proper microservice-oriented applications at close to no cost, at least compared to the implementation overhead you have when doing similar implementations on other, somewhat similar platforms.

I think it defies the point of an architecture like this to build services or actors that span multiple concerns. It makes sense (to me at least) to use these imaginary constraints to force you to keep the area of responsibility of these services as small as possible - and rather depend on/call other services in order to provide functionality outside of the responsibility of the project you are currently implementing.

In regards to scaling, it seems you'll still be able to scale your services/actors independently even though they are a part of the same project - at least that's implied by looking at the application manifest format. What you will not be able to do, though, are independent updates of services/actors within your project. As an example; if your project has two different actors, and you make a change to one of them, you will still need to deploy an update to both of them since they are part of the same code package and will share a version number.