Not So Stupid Question: 331: Net Aspire, What Does an Opinionated Stack Mean

If it wasn’t for me looking like I was a zombie, I would have taken a selfie so you could see the state of my office right now! With less than three weeks to go before we move houses our home, and therefore also our Home Office, is a complete an utter mess with boxes stacked alongside all the walls. I started packing already in November, and unpacking one or two boxes a day so I won’t have to pack everything at the last minute. Anyway, I had to find the time to write a third edition of my.net web development book, and I’m currently writing the section on .NET8. Which reminded me of a conversation I had a few days ago, when I was discussing .NET Aspire with a fellow tech friend.

.NET aspire was released and announced in November 2023 with the yearly release of.NET. And if there’s one sentence I’ve heard and read a lot, it’s the following:

.NET Aspire is an opinionated, cloud ready stack for building observable, production ready, distributed applications.

A few days ago, I was discussing the stack with a friend of mine, and was asked what opinionated means in this context. And I reckon that’s a great question! Let’s break down that sentence.

Optionated
A collection of software tools, frameworks, and libraries that come pre-configured with a set of predefined conventions, best practices, and design patterns. In simple terms, an opinionated stack provides strong suggestions on how to structure, implement, and maintain the software systems using that particular stack.

Cloud ready
Specifically designed to leverage the capabilities and benefits of cloud computing. Implies the following characteristics: scalable, resilient, elasticity, flexible and secure.

Observable
Stack that offers capability to provide insight into their internal state, behavior, and performance. Some key aspects of this observability: Monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting.

Production ready
Equipped, well-prepared and configured to handle the demands of a production app.

Distributed applications
Systems that are designed to run across multiple computers or devices, and that work together and appear as a single system. Instead of the old-school/traditional standalone single system which has a single point of failure, can be difficult to scale, modify and expand, we have several asynchronous smaller systems that work together.

.NET Aspire helps with orchestration (app composition, service discovery and connection string management), components (commonly used services accessible through standardized interfaces) and templates and tooling. You can find some questions and answers here, in addition to more information. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/reference/aspire-faq

Not So Stupid Question: 331: Net Aspire, What Does an Opinionated Stack Mean

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