Summary

  • 3 minutes

The cloud has changed how developers build applications.

Some of the changing business needs include:

  • A service that's built and operated at scale to reach customers in new geographic regions.
  • Faster delivery of features and capabilities to respond to customer demands in an agile way.
  • Improved resource utilization to reduce costs.

A microservices architecture helps address these needs by building a single application that's composed of a set of small services. Each microservice implements a specific, end-to-end domain or business capability within a certain context boundary. Each microservice must be developed autonomously and be independently deployable.

Using containers is a common approach to building microservices. Each application or service, its dependencies, and its configuration (abstracted as deployment manifest files) are packaged together as a container image. Docker is a popular way to containerize applications.

A Dockerfile is a text file that contains instructions for how to build a Docker image. The .NET SDK now directly enables you to create containers through the dotnet publish command and support the same commands as the Dockerfile. A Docker Compose file is a YAML file that groups together several Docker containers for build and deployment.

Finally, .NET was built to be cloud-native first. It runs cross-platform, so your container image can be based on a flavor of Linux, and your .NET code still runs. .NET is extremely fast, and Microsoft has already created .NET images for containers and Docker.

Cleanup Codespace

You can delete the codespace on GitHub under By repository where you see MicrosoftDocs/mslearn-dotnet-cloudnative.

Related content

These resources can help you learn more about microservices with .NET: