What You’ll Build

Unlike other more reference-style books that are all about showing you each and every API, library, and syntax pattern available to you in a given language, this book is written and meant to be consumed as a guide to building services, with ASP.NET Core simply being the framework in which all the code samples are built.

This book will not teach you every single nuance of low-level C# code; there are far thicker books written by other people if that’s what you’re looking for. My goal is that by the end of the book, creating, testing, compiling, and deploying microservices in ASP Core will be muscle memory for you. You’ll develop good, practical habits that will help you rapidly build stable, secure, reliable services.

The mentality I’d like you to have is that after reading this book, you’ll have learned a lot about how to build services that are going to be deployed in elastically scalable, high-performance cloud environments. ASP Core in C# is just one of many languages and frameworks you can use to build services, but the language does not make the service you do. The care, discipline, and diligence you put into building your services is far more a predictor of their success in production than any one language or tool ever could be.

The paintbrushes and canvas do not make the painting, the painter does. You are a painter of services, and ASP.NET Core is just one brush among many.

In this book, you’ll start with the basic building blocks of any service, and then learn how to turn them into more powerful and robust services. You’ll connect to databases and other backing services, and use lightweight distributed caches, secure services, and web apps, all while keeping an eye on the ability to continuously deliver immutable release artifacts in the form of Docker images.

Why You’re Building Services

Different teams work on different release cadences with different requirements, motivations, and measures of success. Gone are the days of building monoliths that require a custom, handcrafted, artisanal server in order to run properly. Hopefully, gone as well are the days of gathering a hundred people in conference rooms and on dial-in lines to hope and pray for the successful release of a product at 12:01 on a Sunday morning.

Microservices, if done properly, can give us the agility and drastically reduced time to market that our companies need in order to survive and thrive in this new world where nearly every vertical, regardless of its domain, seems to need software running in the cloud to make money.

As you progress through the book you’ll see the rationalizations for each decision made. From the individual lines of code to the high-level architectural 'napkin drawings,' I’ll discuss the pros and cons of each choice.

What You’ll Need to Build Services

First and foremost, you’ll need the .NET Core command-line utilities and the appropriate software development kit (SDK) installed. In the first chapter I’ll walk you through what you’ll need to get that set up.

Next, you’re going to need Docker. Docker and the container technology that supports it are ubiquitous these days. Regardless of whether you’re deploying to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or your own infrastructure, Docker provides the portable and immutable release artifacts that you crave (and I’ll get more into the details of why this is the case throughout the book).

The development and build pipeline for the services in this book is the creation of Docker images running on Linux infrastructure in the cloud. As such, the path of least friction for readers of this book is likely a Mac or a Linux machine. You’ll be able to work with Windows, but some things may be higher-friction or require extra workarounds. The new Linux subsystem for Windows 10 helps with this, but still isn’t ideal.

Docker on Windows and the Mac will use virtual machines to host a Linux kernel (required for Docker’s container tech), and as such you may find your machine struggling a bit if you don’t have enough RAM.

If you’re using Linux (I used Ubuntu to verify the code), then you don’t need any virtual machines as Docker can run directly on top of a Linux kernel.

1. 

   Kevin Hoffman

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   I have always had an insatiable desire to build - when I was a kid I started building things with my hands and tools, but once I discovered that I could create whole worlds and fantastic adventures within those worlds, I was hooked on writing. Today I have been able to put my desire to build to work by writing software, which pays the bills enough to let me keep writing books and building rich worlds.

   I can occasionally be found off-roading on the trails of New England in a custom-built, armored Jeep that I call the "Zombie Killer".

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   Kevin Hoffman

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