Episode 238

Download / Listen: Herding Code 238: Martin Beeby on AWS for .NET Developers

At DevSum Stockholm, Jon talks with Martin Beeby about .NET development on AWS.

• (00:20) The guys reminisce about Martin’s awesome blog post, Client Requests Through the Years.
• (03:30) Martin walks us through his career, which includes early adoption of .NET, stepping away for a bit to pursue Node and Java development, and returning to the .NET fold in his current role as a Developer Evangelist focused on .NET for AWS.
• (08:00) Martin shares to how other developers are returning to .NET and the freshness in the community. .NET developers are progressive with AWS and large systems.
• (10:40) Martin speaks to his evangelism roles with Microsoft, Oracle and now AWS. Spoiler alert. It’s not just standing at a booth, but real-world storytelling of customer use cases and encouraging platform adoption.
• (13:15) Jon and Martin talk about the intersection of AWS and .NET development in which AWS is the original cloud hosting option so there are highly skilled, highly progressive .NET shops along with AWS experts that are new to .NET, and .NET developers who are completely new to AWS and cloud computing.
• (16:35) Jon asks about the fastest way for a .NET developer to get up and running on AWS. Martin talks to the AWS SDK for .NET and AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, which is an extension that features the AWS Explorer.
• (18:40) Martin explores AWS deployment options including CLI scripting, AWS CloudFormation Templates, Cloud Development Kit, AWS extensions for CI/CD tools like Jenkins, AWS’s own suite of CI/CD tooling and even Powershell.
• (20:35) Jon asks about AWS Lambda. Martin touches upon other hosting options including Elastic Beanstalk and containers and then digs into serverless.
• (22:35) Martin shares how one can spin up a full-blown application which leverages serverless infrastructure using AWS Visual Studio Tools. It’s something along the lines of AWS Visual Studio Tools  > File > New > AWS Lambda and Sample Projects > ASP.NET Core Project, which creates an MVC website with Lambda entry point and provisioned API Gateway, which provides complete MVC sample application hosted in AWS.
• (25:40) Martin drives home the message that when AWS Lambda isn’t being used, you aren’t paying anything. You only pay for the compute time you consume. Jon speaks to massive scaling and “micro scaling” in the cloud.
• (27:15) Martin talks further about low cost and low scale with functions as well as statically hosting websites which use serverless for auth and lambda processing. Martin walks through the specific use case of Comic Relief, which benefited greatly (93% cost savings) from serverless hosting.   
• (29:50) Martin speaks to AWS Amplify and there’s more discussion of scalability, burstability, and agility.
• (31:00) Martin wraps up the chat sharing how functions allow developers to mix-and-match languages, which promotes using the right tool for the job. For example, audio manipulation using Python, when the rest of the application may be written in C#.
• (33:00) Explore AWS and .NET on AWS.
• (33:30) Read more from The Beebs.

Thanks to Ben Griswold for writing up the show notes!