The Benefits of Building Microservices with ASP .NET Core

Dharmin Shah

12 Oct, 2020

Staying monolithic in today’s world, it’s hard to change and respond to the whimsical market demands. That’s why the modern and exciting microservice approach to software development is rapidly gaining popularity against the monolithic one. So whether you are a developer or a business owner, whether you have an application or just plan its creation, we invite you to get acquainted with microservices and discover their benefits. And, of course, having added .NET development to the list of our services, we cannot but enlarge upon the .NET framework being a perfect tool to build microservices with.

Microservices: so what are they?
There is no exact definition, but this is the essence — microservices represent a software architectural style in which complex applications are a set of small, lightweight, individually deployable, self-contained, highly independent, loosely coupled services, each of which is responsible for its particular process. This is opposed to the monolithic style where apps are made as a single unit.

Microservices collaborate with each other based on their needs to perform a certain action. They communicate through APIs that do not depend on a particular language.

This approach resembles a team where each member concentrates on their special task and is given the responsibility, the freedom, and the trust to perform it in the best way. It’s usually very productive!

You can take the microservice architecture for building your application from scratch. However, even a monolithic app can still be divided into highly focused services. Why is it worth doing? When done right, microservices represent a world of benefits. Let’s take a closer look.

Microservices and their macro benefits
Fast & easy changes and low-risk deployments
If you change something in one microservice, you can deploy it individually without touching the others, which can keep running. So small changes can be deployed as often as necessary and keep your app up-to-date as needed. It’s different from the monolithic architecture — any change requires the deployment of the whole complex system.

Completely modernized apps with no fuss
Any microservice is replaceable in your system. It can be rewritten from scratch within a reasonable time with no need to rebuild the whole app. Always modern, easily taking the shape of your new ideas, scalable, extendable — this is what your app can be like.

Even if it’s a very old monolithic app, there’s a chance to avoid “the big rewrite” by converting it into the microservice “philosophy.” Just gradually cut off parts of the system without taking it down, and make them into microservices. With time, it will be a completely modernized app.

Potentially easier for the dev team to understand, maintain & test
A microservice is typically small in its code base and has its own data store. This makes microservices easier for developers to understand and maintain if they are done right. Microservices are also easier to completely cover with automated tests. In any case, testers should check just a small area, so the process is faster, the feedback is more prompt, and the team feels more confident.

A bug in one microservice will not seriously affect the entire system
A failure of a microservice is not going to bring the whole application down. Larger applications may remain largely unaffected by it.

Microservices written using different languages & platforms can work together
Just like good team members, microservices can be all different and reveal their special skills at teamwork. They just need to know how to communicate with each other. With microservices, this can be done through, most commonly, HTTP, a service bus, a binary protocol, and more.
The ability to use different programming languages and tools offers you a fine-tuned approach to building your services. You can use the right tool for the right job, and add new technologies when you wish.

You can have different teams working at different services
Because of this, you can have multiple teams each of which will work with different parts of the app. Let every team show what they are best at.

Building microservices with .NET
The philosophy of microservices and .NET are similar which makes the latter a great framework for building microservices with. .NET is designed to be easily componentized. At the beginning of the 2000s, .NET was among the first platforms used to build applications as services in accordance with SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). This approach is similar to modern microservices.

The arrival of Asp.Net Core lets developers create cross-platform microservices with .NET on Windows, Linux, or Mac, as well as easily deploy them to the cloud.