About the course
Building distributed applications is notoriously complex, requiring developers to manage service discovery, connection strings, and observability across multiple moving parts. This one-day intensive course introduces Aspire, an opinionated, cloud-ready stack designed to radically simplify the development of multi-project applications.
We explore how Aspire provides a consistent way to orchestrate resources like databases, caches, and messaging queues during development, while ensuring your apps are production-ready from day one. You will learn how to bootstrap new projects, "Aspire-ify" existing solutions, and leverage the powerful Aspire Dashboard for real-time debugging. The day concludes with a practical look at the deployment lifecycle, specifically moving your distributed apps into Azure Container Apps with ease.
Instructor-led online and in-house face-to-face options are available - as part of a wider customised training programme, or as a standalone workshop, on-site at your offices or at one of many flexible meeting spaces in the UK and around the World.
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By the end of this course, attendees will be able to:
- Orchestrate Local Development: Use the AppHost to manage multiple projects, containers, and executables as a single logical unit.
- Master Service Defaults: Implement standardized resilience, health checks, and service discovery across all microservices.
- Utilize the Aspire Dashboard: Leverage deep observability (logs, traces, and metrics) to debug distributed interactions in real-time.
- Integrate Cloud Resources: Add and configure "Components" for popular services like Redis, PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ.
- Streamline Deployment: Understand the workflow for deploying Aspire-orchestrated applications to Azure using the Azure Developer CLI (azd).
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This course is designed for .NET Developers and Architects who are building or maintaining microservices, distributed systems, or multi-project solutions and want to reduce the "plumbing" overhead in their development inner-loop.
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Attendees should be comfortable with Modern .NET development (e.g. with a recent version of C#). Familiarity with Docker is beneficial but not required, as Aspire handles much of the container orchestration logic for you.
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This Aspire course is available for private / custom delivery for your team - as an in-house face-to-face workshop at your location of choice, or as online instructor-led training via MS Teams (or your own preferred platform).
Get in touch to find out how we can deliver tailored training which focuses on your project requirements and learning goals.
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Introduction to the Aspire Stack
The Challenges of Distributed Systems: Service discovery, configuration, and the "inner-loop" problem.
Setting up the Environment: Visual Studio/VS Code requirements and the Aspire SDK.
Anatomy of an Aspire Project: Understanding the AppHost and ServiceDefaults projects.
Hands-on Lab: Creating your first Aspire solution from scratch.
Orchestration and Components
Managing Resources: Adding .NET projects, containers (Docker), and external executables to the AppHost.
Aspire Components: Integrating pre-configured NuGet packages for Redis, SQL Server, and more.
Service Discovery & Connection Management: How Aspire handles naming and secrets without manual configuration.
Resilience and Health Checks: Leveraging built-in Polly policies and health monitoring.
Hands-on Lab: Adding a Redis cache and a PostgreSQL database to your distributed app.
Observability and the Aspire Dashboard
The Aspire Dashboard: A deep dive into the real-time telemetry portal.
Distributed Tracing: Visualizing request flows across multiple services using OpenTelemetry (OTEL).
Logs and Metrics: Aggregating structured logs and monitoring resource health.
Debugging Techniques: Using the dashboard to identify bottlenecks and failures in the local environment.
Deployment and Azure Integration
Preparing for Production: The relationship between Aspire and the Azure Developer CLI (azd).
Targeting Azure Container Apps (ACA): Why ACA is the natural home for Aspire applications.
Deployment Workflows: Using azd up to provision infrastructure and deploy code in a single step.
Bicep and Manifests: A look under the hood at how Aspire generates infrastructure-as-code.
Hands-on Lab: Deploying your orchestrated Aspire application to Azure.
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