.NET Aspire is a new, opinionated framework offering tools and libraries for creating microservices with .NET, no matter whether they should run on-premises, on Microsoft Azure, or in any other cloud environment. In this book, you will learn how to get the most out of .NET Aspire when you build your solutions.

Creating ASP.NET Core minimal APIs (an easy and fast option for creating REST services) is just a small part of creating applications using a microservices-based architecture. This book covers all the different aspects that are needed for building a successful solution. Accessing databases, both relational as well as NoSQL; using Docker and deploying Docker images; automatic deployment with GitHub actions; monitoring the solution with logging, metrics data, and distributed tracing; creating unit tests, integration tests, and load tests; automatically publishing the solution to different environments; and using binary, real-time, and asynchronous communication – all of this is covered in the book.

Through the code provided in this book, you’ll work on a backend solution to run a cool game. From Chapter 2, you’ll already have usable and testable functionality, and it will be enhanced chapter by chapter to cover all the important aspects relating to microservices. If you don’t want to work through each chapter in sequence, we have provided code that you can start with for each chapter.

The application can run deployed to Microsoft Azure, using several Azure services such as Azure Container Apps, Container Registry, Cosmos DB, App Configuration, Key Vault, Redis, and SignalR Service. It can also run in an on-premises environment on a Kubernetes cluster using Kafka, Redis, and other resources.

By the end of this book, you’ll have become confident in implementing a stable, performant, and scalable solution and using various Azure services that are great for hosting such a service-based solution. While the solution of the book is a game, the knowledge learned will help you to create any business-related service architecture.