The application lifecycle management of workloads deployed on a Service Fabric cluster is owned by the Management Subsystem. Application developers can access the Management Subsystem functionalities through administrative APIs or PowerShell cmdlets to provision, deploy, upgrade, or de-provision applications. All these operations can be performed without any downtime. The Management Subsystem has three key components – cluster manager, health manager, and image store.

The cluster manager interacts with the failover manager and the resource manager in the Reliability Subsystem for deploying the applications of available nodes considering the placement constraints. It is responsible for the lifecycle of the application, starting from provisioning to de-provisioning. It also integrates with the health manager to perform health checks during service upgrades.

Health manager, as the name suggests, is responsible for monitoring the health of applications, services, nodes, partitions, and replicas. It is also responsible for aggregating the health status and storing it in a centralized health store. APIs are exposed out of this system to query health events to perform corrective actions. The APIs can either return raw events or aggregated health data for a specific cluster resource.

The image store is responsible for persisting and distributing application binaries deployed on a Service Fabric cluster.