Microsoft Build Conference 2023 Session Summary: Cloud Native Development with .NET 8

The session introduced the newly built .NET 8 Framework for cloud-native development. Brady Gaster is the Principal Program Manager in the ASP.NET team at Microsoft, where he works on SignalR, microservices and APIs, and integration with Azure services.He is also part of the Azure Developer Experience team. He covered some exciting new features of the .NET 8 Framework using Docker in multi-container web applications.

Brady Gaster has a long 20-year career in software development specialized in .NET Architecture. Over this course of time, he worked in multiple companies as a senior developer or senior .NET consultant. For more than 11 years now, he has been working at Microsoft and has been an integral part of the development team along with management. This makes him the right person to be presenting the new updates and features of .NET 8 for Cloud-Native development.

The session began with highlights of .NET’s app services and how to deploy them on different platforms. .NET considers the services that users need and deploys them on platforms such as Kubernetes, Linux, etc. Upgrading to more recent .NET versions (6+) lowers the processing time and memory usage of applications significantly, thereby saving costs.

Next, the focus shifted to the Azure App Service, which was updated to utilize the new YARP reverse proxy server, built on the .NET 8 Framework. The development teams for Azure and .NET collaborated on YARP’s development and release. Improvements to YARP include reductions in CPU and memory usage, more flexible extensibility points, and easier dynamic SNI host selection.

.NET 8 enables customers to implement additional use cases. It brought forth the inclusion of gRPC on Azure, along with the ability to create custom error pages.

The presenter also discussed the main incentive for making Cloud-native apps with the new .NET 8 Framework. Such applications run in dynamic private, public, or hybrid cloud environments, and they use robust automation to make systems resilient, manageable and observable. This allows engineers to make high-impact changes frequently with minimal toil.

Finally, the presenter executed a demo app to explore Cloud-native app features, such as file logging, metric reporting, distributed trace, and app resiliency.

The entire session was a treat to watch as a .NET developer. Learning new techniques for hosting and deploying web services on different platforms can bring about drastic improvements in the work that we produce. Iron Software products have always been compatible with all versions of .NET. In like kind, they will also support cloud-native development on the latest .NET 8 Framework in the coming months.