Service Fabric Deallocation Using PowerShell To Save Costs

Introduction

While implementing Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, customers seem to be very confused about the costs associated with the resources and need professional help to reduce its total monthly Azure Subscription costs. One of the scenarios which I am going to discuss is when there is an environment created by the customer (say UAT) that is very rarely used. The customer has deployed multiple services in a resource group including AppServices and ServiceFabric Cluster Node with multiple applications. For some time, the customer does not realize the costs associated with Service Fabric Clusters (which can be found here with Microsoft providing pricing calculator for each resource you create). After some time, they realize that it's costing them too much for their liking and now, they need to get rid of this overhead since they are not using all the environments all the time. At the same time, we should not be deleting and recreating the SF Cluster but reusing the deployed infrastructure. Let's discuss what options I came across while trying to implement this. One of the options that I was looking for was a feature to shut down Service Fabric Cluster as a one-click option. But unfortunately, there is none of that sort. This is unfortunate, I think, as there is an option to start/stop AppServices, but probably since multiple applications are deployed to a cluster, Microsoft wanted to do this using Service Fabric Explorer only...Yes, you heard it right.. you can do this from Service Fabric Explorer. But we are discussing here a way to automate this...so hang on.

Anyway, after trying for some time, I found some useful information on MSDN and the Internet that it cannot be shut down but rather you need to individually start/stop the Cluster Nodes. That gave me some direction and I started looking into the options to implement this. First, PowerShell set of commands that I worked on is Start-ClusterNode and Stop-ClusterNode. To implement these, you need to follow some steps -

First, connect to cluster (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/servicefabric/connect-servicefabriccluster?view=azureservicefabricps) and then, Get-Cluster Nodes(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/servicefabric/get-servicefabricnode?view=azureservicefabricps).