Understanding the platform-layer components 

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations platform layer represents the compute, operating system, and applications to host the various components of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. Finance and Operations comprises multiple applications, such as AOS, Batch Service, Data Import/Export Service, Retail Server, Management Reporter, and SQL Server Reporting Services. The following is a list of the various application components and their corresponding usage:

In cloud deployment, these components are deployed and run on a Windows Server container. The following diagram shows a logical view of the containers deployed in the cloud deployment model:

In the local business data or on-premises deployment, all the application components are deployed using Microsoft Azure Service Fabric standalone clusters on the customer data center.

Service Fabric is a next-generation Microsoft middleware platform for building and managing enterprise-class, high-scale applications. Service Fabric standalone clusters can be deployed on any computer that runs on Windows Server.

On-premises deployment needs an additional component called an environment orchestrator to enable the on-premises environment management from LCS. The following diagram shows the logical architecture of on-premises deployment: