.NET Aspire: A Game-Changer for Cloud-Native Development?

I've been tinkering with .NET Aspire lately, and I've got some thoughts to share. If you're curious about this new cloud-native development tool from Microsoft, stick around. I'll break down what's great, what's not, and how you can start using it.

.NET Aspire is an opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building observable, production-ready, distributed applications.

.NET Aspire is Microsoft's latest offering for cloud-native application development. It aims to simplify the process of building, deploying, and managing distributed applications.

Distributed applications often consist of small applications that consume external services like databases, message brokers, and caching. .NET Aspire gives you a set of tools to make building distributed applications easier.

.NET Aspire Orchestration

How are you setting up a local development environment? I often use Docker Compose to configure my applications and run external services. It's a simple setup, but you need to manage environment variables and connection strings. If you're not familiar with Docker, it can prove to be quite tricky sometimes.

Here's a docker-compose.yml file from a recent project:

services:
  contentplatform-api:
    image: ${DOCKER_REGISTRY-}contentplatform-api
    container_name: ContentPlatform.Api
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: ContentPlatform.Api/Dockerfile
    ports:
      - 5000:8080
      - 5001:8081

  contentplatform-reporting-api:
    image: ${DOCKER_REGISTRY-}contentplatform-reporting-api
    container_name: ContentPlatform.Reporting.Api
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: ContentPlatform.Reporting.Api/Dockerfile
    ports:
      - 6000:8080
      - 6001:8081

  contentplatform-presentation:
    image: contentplatform-ui:latest
    container_name: ContentPlatform.Presentation
    environment:
      - ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development
    ports:
      - 3000:80

  contentplatform-db:
    image: postgres:latest
    container_name: ContentPlatform.Db
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_DB=contentplatform
      - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
    volumes:
      - ./.containers/db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    ports:
      - 5432:5432

  contentplatform-mq:
    image: rabbitmq:management
    container_name: ContentPlatform.RabbitMq
    hostname: contentplatform-mq
    volumes:
      - ./.containers/queue/data/:/var/lib/rabbitmq
      - ./.containers/queue/log/:/var/log/rabbitmq
    environment:
      RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER: guest
      RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS: guest

This sets up two APIs, a client application, PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ. I also have to configure the connection strings manually to connect to these services.

So, I decided to migrate this application to .NET Aspire and documented the process.

You can right-click an existing project in Visual Studio and select Add > .NET Aspire Orchestrator Support....

This will add an AppHost and ServiceDefaults project to your solution. You will then repeat this for the remaining projects in your solution to enlist them all in Aspire orchestration.

The AppHost project is responsible for orchestration. You can define your entire application stack in a single, readable file. Running the AppHost project from Visual Studio will start the required applications and services.

Here's the setup for my application using Aspire:

IDistributedApplicationBuilder builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var postgres = builder.AddPostgres("contentplatform-db")
    .WithPgAdmin();

var rabbitMq = builder.AddRabbitMQ("contentplatform-mq")
    .WithManagementPlugin();

builder.AddProject<Projects.ContentPlatform_Api>("contentplatform-api")
    .WithReference(postgres)
    .WithReference(rabbitMq);

builder.AddProject<Projects.ContentPlatform_Reporting_Api>("contentplatform-reporting-api")
    .WithReference(postgres)
    .WithReference(rabbitMq);

builder.AddProject<Projects.ContentPlatform_Presentation>("contentplatform-presentation");

builder.Build().Run();

The Aspire version is much more concise and readable. Adding new services or changing configurations is straightforward. You also get built-in observability. Aspire includes tools for logging, metrics, and distributed tracing out of the box, making it easier to monitor and debug your applications.

When you run the application, you can see your applications and services on the Aspire dashboard:

Orchestration - The Bad Parts

There are a few things I don't like with the current Aspire setup.

The AppHost project needs to reference all other projects to enlist them in orchestration. If your services are all in one solution, this might be fine. But what about large microservices systems?

We can go around this limitation by building a Docker image for an external service. There's an AddContainer method that allows us to configure container resources. However, we won't be able to debug these services.

The ServiceDefaults projects needs to be visible to all other applications. Again, this works perfectly fine if everything is in one solution. We can also distribute this project as a NuGet package for complex systems.

.NET Aspire Integrations

If you're wondering how I configured PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ in the previous example, this is made available using Aspire Integrations. These are NuGet packages that allow you to integrate with popular services, such as Redis or PostgreSQL. Aspire integrations take care of many cloud-native concerns for you, like adding health checks and telemetry.

You can right-click on the AppHost project and select Add > .NET Aspire package... to see the list of available integrations:

If we want to add Redis to our project, we can install the Aspire.Hosting.Redis package. Then, we would configure the Redis integration in the AppHost project:

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

// Other service omitted for brevity

var redis = builder.AddRedis("contentplatform-cache");

builder.AddProject<Projects.ContentPlatform_Api>("contentplatform-api")
    .WithReference(postgres)
    .WithReference(rabbitMq)
    .WithReference(redis);

builder.Build().Run();

You can find a list of supported Aspire integrations in the documentation.

When you configure a resource with a known connection string format, Aspire automatically injects an environment variable. The connection string name will have the same name as the respective resource.

• WithReference(postgres) produces ConnectionStrings__contentplatform-db="<VALUE>"
• WithReference(rabbitMq) produces ConnectionStrings__contentplatform-mq="<VALUE>"
• WithReference(redis) produces ConnectionStrings__contentplatform-cache="<VALUE>"

This lets you use logical connection string names when configuring your services:

builder.Services.AddDbContext<ApplicationDbContext>(o =>
    o.UseNpgsql(builder.Configuration.GetConnectionString("contentplatform-db")));

Service Defaults and OpenTelemetry

One of Aspire's killer features is its built-in observability stack. It integrates OpenTelemetry, providing distributed tracing, metrics, and logging out of the box.

When you enlist a project in .NET Aspire orchestration, there are some updates made to the Program file automatically:

• AddServiceDefaults is called to configure OpenTelemetry, health checks, and service discovery
• MapDefaultEndpoints is called to expose the health check endpoint

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.AddServiceDefaults();

// Other code omitted for brevity

var app = builder.Build();

app.MapDefaultEndpoints();

// Other code omitted for brevity

app.Run();

You can customize AddServiceDefaults according to your requirements. For example, if you're using MassTransit, you can add the respective tracing configuration for this library.

Here's the distributed traces view on the Aspire dashboard. You can see a POST request hitting the contentplatform-api service, publishing an ArticleCreatedEvent, and consuming that message in the contentplatform-reporting-api service.

For local development, the .NET Aspire dashboard provides a UI for viewing telemetry data. In a production environment, you can configure the OpenTelemetry server to receive telemetry data using the OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT environment variable.

Deploying .NET Aspire Applications

.NET Aspire simplifies the deployment process for distributed applications, especially when targeting Azure. To deploy an Aspire application, you first generate a manifest file using the dotnet run command with specific parameters. This manifest is a JSON file that describes all the resources defined in your Aspire project, including services, databases, and other dependencies.

Deployment tools can use the manifest to set up the necessary infrastructure in your target environment. Aspire generates the required configuration for Azure Container Apps or Kubernetes for Azure deployments. It handles tasks like setting up networking, scaling services, and configuring monitoring automatically.

Here's a simple example of generating a manifest:

dotnet run --project ContentPlatform.AppHost\ContentPlatform.AppHost.csproj `
    -- --publisher manifest --output-path ../aspire-manifest.json

This command creates a JSON manifest file that deployment tools can use to set up your application in the cloud or on-premises infrastructure.

You can learn more about Aspire deployment in the documentation.

Summary

I've used .NET Aspire a lot lately, and I'm genuinely impressed.

Aspire makes building complex systems much easier. I can set up a distributed system with just a few lines of C# code. This is much simpler than using Docker Compose. The built-in observability and monitoring tools are also great.

While .NET Aspire is now production-ready, the ecosystem around it is still growing. Developers, particularly those new to cloud-native concepts, might face a learning curve.

Should you adopt Aspire in your .NET projects?

If you're building distributed applications, especially for Azure, I'd say give it a try. However, you might want to evaluate carefully if you work on simpler applications or use non-Azure cloud services.

That's all for today.

See you next week.

P.S. You can find the source code for this example in this repository.