Overview

• Introduction
• What is .NET Aspire?
• Prerequisites
• Example Project
• Deploying to Kubernetes

Introduction

Kubernetes is widely used for modern applications due to its auto-scaling, easy deployment, and cloud-native features. Microsoft is also pushing .NET to be more cloud-native. Recently, they introduced .NET Aspire, a toolset designed to make cloud-native development easier.

What is .NET Aspire?

.NET Aspire is a collection of tools, templates, and packages that help developers build production-ready, observable applications.

While it’s not a replacement for Kubernetes, it simplifies the cloud-native experience on your local machine and provides flexible deployment options. For example, you can:

• Use azd deploy to deploy your app to Azure.
• Use Docker Compose or Docker Swarm.
• Deploy directly to Kubernetes.

In this guide, we’ll build a microservice project with .NET Aspire, define microservice relationships, create a Helm chart, and deploy it to Kubernetes.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have:

• .NET Aspire
• Docker
• Helm

Example Project

For this tutorial, I created a project called Library. It includes:

• A single API service (library-api).
• Dependencies: a PostgreSQL database and Redis.

Here’s how the infrastructure is defined in App Host Program.cs:

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var redis = builder.AddRedis("redis");

var libraryDb = builder.AddPostgres("postgres")
    .WithDataVolume()
    .AddDatabase("library");

builder.AddProject<Projects.Library_Api>("library-api")
    .WithReference(redis)
    .WithReference(libraryDb);

builder.Build().Run();

Deploying to Kubernetes

1 - Set Up a Local Docker Registry Install Distribution (formerly known as Registry) as a local Docker Hub (Container Registry).

docker run -d -p 6000:5000 --name registry registry:latest

2 - Install aspirate

dotnet tool install -g aspirate

3 - Initialise aspirate

cd Library.AppHost
aspirate init -cr localhost:6000 -ct latest --disable-secrets true --non-interactive

4 - Build and publish the app to the local container registry

aspirate generate --image-pull-policy Always --include-dashboard true --disable-secrets true --non-interactive

5 - Deploy the app to the Kubernetes cluster.

helm upgrade aspire-helm-demo . --install --namespace aspire-demo --create-namespace --wait

6 - Check the services in the Kubernetes cluster.

kubectl get services -n aspire-demo

you can use port-forward command to open aspire dashboard

Check out the library project here:

• https://github.com/eminvergil/aspire-samples

You can also check similar posts about .NET Aspire:

• Aspire Kubernetes Deployment
• Redis Pub/Sub with Aspire and .NET
• Aspire Azure Emulators