Service Applications and MinRoles

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In a single server Farm, you might decide to have everything running on that one server.

On a multi-server Farm, services can be started or stopped on particular servers in your Farm to support scale out.

From SharePoint 2016 onwards, you can define MinRoles.

That’s the smallest set of services that you require to be switched on for a tier of servers.

A MinRole can then be allocated to specific servers.

SharePoint now takes care of making sure the right services are started.

To load balance Services without MinRoles, you just start an instance of your Service on a new Server.

However, with MinRoles, you just need to associate your MinRole with the server.

SharePoint will then start and load balance the requisite Services without any further work on your part.

Service Applications

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If Web Applications are about delivering Content, then Service Applications are all about doing the heavy lifting in your Farm.

Service Applications are responsible for everything from Search, to Managed Metadata. From managing add-ins, to User Profiles.

Under the hood, it’s Services that do the actual work. A Service Application is an administrative conceit that wraps Services.

Each Web Application in your Farm can be configured to consume specific Services.

Web Applications don’t talk directly to Services.

Instead, they invoke a Proxy or Service Connection.

For administrative purposes, we group these Proxies up into Proxy Groups, and allocate those to Web Applications instead.

In other words:

The Web App’s connected to the Proxy Group.

The Proxy Group’s connected to the Proxy.

The Proxy’s connected to the Service App.

The Service App’s connected to the Service. (Now hear the word of the Lord).