The .NET programming language is taking cloud native deployment and observability seriously, and most notably with the recent announcement of .NET Aspire stack unveiled at the recent .NET Conf 2023. 

In this episode, we reviewed the open source maintainers’ journey to making .NET a "by default, out of the box observable platform", as ASP.NET Core creator David Fowler put it. David was this episode’s guest, and with him we dived into .NET Aspire and how it simplifies the complexities of cloud app development with capabilities around service discovery, observability, and resilience. We discussed the local developer experience, the path to developer observability, and what we can expect from the upcoming GA release of .NET8.

David Fowler has been at Microsoft for 15 years working on developer frameworks and tools in the .NET space. He's one of the creators of several popular OSS frameworks and tools such as NuGet, SignalR and ASP.NET Core, and also architected the Azure SignalR Service. Originally from Barbados, he's an avid open-source advocate and developer currently focused on simplifying developer experiences in the microservice space. 

The episode was live-streamed on 21 February 2024 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll1T9Zs7jUo

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Show Notes:

00:10 - episode and guest intro

04:03 - what .NET used to be like for developing cloud-native

15:10 - out-of-the-box observability in .NET

21:05 - .NET aligning with OpenTelemetry

26:40 - what’s .NET Aspire

32:37 - existing .NET components are part of Aspire

37:46 - developing an observability UI as part of Aspire

43:24 - how to transition containerized apps from dev to prod 

48:48 - the relationship between Aspire to Dapr and Radius

53:31 - Aspire roadmap to GA

57:13 - where to follow Aspire and David Fowler

59:13 - K8sgpt accepted to CNCF as a sandbox project

59:56 - Strimzi reaches CNCF incubation with Kafka on Kubernetes

1:00:40 - OpenFeature becomes a CNCF incubating project

1:03:03 - Broadcom kills free ESXi and other VMware restructuring

Resources:

.NET Aspire GitHub repo: https://github.com/dotnet/aspire 

.NET Aspire Preview 3: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/whats-new/preview-3 

Instrumenting C# .NET apps with OpenTelemetry: https://logz.io/blog/csharp-dotnet-opentelemetry-instrumentation/?utm_source=devrel&utm_medium=devrel

OpenTelemetry beginner’s guide: https://logz.io/learn/opentelemetry-guide/?utm_source=devrel&utm_medium=devrel

K8sgpt accepted to CNCF sandbox: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_genai-sre-kubernetes-activity-7158185284289888256-0KuZ

Strimzi reaches CNCF incubation: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2024/02/08/strimzi-joins-the-cncf-incubator/

OpenFeature reaches CNCF incubation: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/12/19/openfeature-becomes-a-cncf-incubating-project/

Broadcom decided to kill the free edition of ESXi and other VMware restructuring: https://horovits.medium.com/0aea7efafb47

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Dotan Horovits