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.NET Aspire overview
Learn about .NET Aspire, an application stack designed to improve the experience of building cloud-native applications.
11/12/2024

.NET Aspire overview

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.NET Aspire is a set of powerful tools, templates, and packages for building observable, production ready apps.​​ .NET Aspire is delivered through a collection of NuGet packages that handle specific cloud-native concerns. Cloud-native apps often consist of small, interconnected pieces or microservices rather than a single, monolithic code base. Cloud-native apps generally consume a large number of services, such as databases, messaging, and caching. For information on support, see the .NET Aspire Support Policy.

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A distributed application is one that uses computational resources across multiple nodes, such as containers running on different hosts. Such nodes must communicate over network boundaries to deliver responses to users. A cloud-native app is a specific type of distributed app that takes full advantage of the scalability, resilience, and manageability of cloud infrastructures.

Why .NET Aspire?

.NET Aspire is designed to improve the experience of building .NET cloud-native apps. It provides a consistent, opinionated set of tools and patterns that help you build and run distributed apps. .NET Aspire is designed to help you with:

  • Orchestration: .NET Aspire provides features for running and connecting multi-project applications and their dependencies for local development environments.
  • Integrations: .NET Aspire integrations are NuGet packages for commonly used services, such as Redis or Postgres, with standardized interfaces ensuring they connect consistently and seamlessly with your app.
  • Tooling: .NET Aspire comes with project templates and tooling experiences for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and the .NET CLI to help you create and interact with .NET Aspire projects.

Orchestration

In .NET Aspire, orchestration primarily focuses on enhancing the local development experience by simplifying the management of your cloud-native app's configuration and interconnections. It's important to note that .NET Aspire's orchestration isn't intended to replace the robust systems used in production environments, such as Kubernetes. Instead, it provides a set of abstractions that streamline the setup of service discovery, environment variables, and container configurations, eliminating the need to deal with low-level implementation details. These abstractions ensure a consistent setup pattern across apps with numerous integrations and services, making it easier to manage complex applications during the development phase.

.NET Aspire orchestration assists with the following concerns:

  • App composition: Specify the .NET projects, containers, executables, and cloud resources that make up the application.
  • Service discovery and connection string management: The app host manages to inject the right connection strings or network configurations and service discovery information to simplify the developer experience.

For example, using .NET Aspire, the following code creates a local Redis container resource, waits for it to become available, and then configures the appropriate connection string in the "frontend" project with a few helper method calls:

// Create a distributed application builder given the command line arguments.
var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

// Add a Redis server to the application.
var cache = builder.AddRedis("cache");

// Add the frontend project to the application and configure it to use the 
// Redis server, defined as a referenced dependency.
builder.AddProject<Projects.MyFrontend>("frontend")
       .WithReference(cache)
       .WaitFor(cache);

For more information, see .NET Aspire orchestration overview.

Important

The call to xref:Aspire.Hosting.RedisBuilderExtensions.AddRedis* creates a new Redis container in your local dev environment. If you'd rather use an existing Redis instance, you can use the xref:Aspire.Hosting.ParameterResourceBuilderExtensions.AddConnectionString* method to reference an existing connection string. For more information, see Reference existing resources.

.NET Aspire integrations

.NET Aspire integrations are NuGet packages designed to simplify connections to popular services and platforms, such as Redis or PostgreSQL. .NET Aspire integrations handle many cloud-native concerns for you through standardized configuration patterns, such as adding health checks and telemetry. Integrations are two-fold, in that one side represents the service you're connecting to, and the other side represents the client or consumer of that service. In other words, for each hosting package there's a corresponding client package that handles the service connection.

Each integration is designed to work with .NET Aspire orchestration, and their configurations are injected automatically by referencing named resources. In other words, if Example.ServiceFoo references Example.ServiceBar, Example.ServiceFoo inherits the integration's required configurations to allow them to communicate with each other automatically.

For example, consider the following code using the .NET Aspire Service Bus integration:

builder.AddAzureServiceBusClient("servicebus");

The xref:Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.AspireServiceBusExtensions.AddAzureServiceBusClient%2A method handles the following concerns:

  • Registers a xref:Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus.ServiceBusClient as a singleton in the DI container for connecting to Azure Service Bus.
  • Applies xref:Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus.ServiceBusClient configurations either inline through code or through configuration.
  • Enables corresponding health checks, logging, and telemetry specific to the Azure Service Bus usage.

A full list of available integrations is detailed on the .NET Aspire integrations overview page.

Project templates and tooling

.NET Aspire provides a set of project templates and tooling experiences for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and the .NET CLI. These templates are designed to help you create and interact with .NET Aspire projects. The templates are opinionated and come with a set of defaults that help you get started quickly. They include boilerplate code and configurations that are common to cloud-native apps, such as telemetry, health checks, and service discovery. For more information, see .NET Aspire templates.

.NET Aspire templates also include boilerplate extension methods that handle common service configurations for you:

builder.AddServiceDefaults();

For more information on what AddServiceDefaults does, see .NET Aspire service defaults.

When added to your :::no-loc text="Program.cs"::: file, the preceding code handles the following concerns:

  • OpenTelemetry: Sets up formatted logging, runtime metrics, built-in meters, and tracing for ASP.NET Core, gRPC, and HTTP. For more information, see .NET Aspire telemetry.
  • Default health checks: Adds default health check endpoints that tools can query to monitor your app. For more information, see .NET app health checks in C#.
  • Service discovery: Enables service discovery for the app and configures xref:System.Net.Http.HttpClient accordingly.

Next steps

[!div class="nextstepaction"] Quickstart: Build your first .NET Aspire project