Preface
The handwriting is on the wall—most people building software and services
today are rushing to embrace microservices and their benefits in terms of
scale, fault tolerance, and time to market.
This isn’t just because it’s a shiny new fad. The momentum behind
microservices and the concepts driving them is far more important, and those
looking for the pendulum to swing back away from the notion of smaller,
independently deployed modules will be left behind.
Today, we need to be able to build resilient, elastically scalable applications,
and we need to do it rapidly to satisfy the needs of our customers and to keep
ahead of our competition.
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.NET 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.NET 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
