What is a realistic value for the maximum number of on-premise nodes in service fabric? I can't seem to find this documentation anywhere.
There is no theoretical maximum from my understanding. A realistic production workload for an enterprise solution can be 5x Large VMs.
When I first started working with Azure service fabric, I was looking for specific information on On-Premise Vs. Azure clusters. However after 1 year or working with a On-premise productionised cluster I realise that the Microsoft documentation applies to both approaches.
You can start by finding the capacity you require. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-capacity-planning
Here is azure SF based game and this video talks about capacity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brsBlEEXOfk