Why I think .NET Aspire is Overhyped

.NET Aspire is a way to define your distributed system, and then IaC & Deployment tooling have to pick up the slack getting your definition out there, is this a good thing?
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[@ronaldschutte7948]

This is not meant to spin up a production environment. It is meant to make it easier for developers to create a local dev environment and cloud dev environment. There is also an alpha tool infrasynth to get the bicep files. This would be a great starting point for the infra and devops people to create test and production environments.

[@ilyahryapko]

Anton's hair length migration process over time is really interesting to watch

[@frankhaugen]

It's for orchestration yet working with multiple repos isn't supported... How do I get this set up for my 134 repos with services, IDPs, cache providers etc?

[@PticostaricaGS]

As other have said .NET Aspire has nothing to do with deployment, the team itself has mentioned that the main purpose of .NET Aspire is in the development realm, to facilitate development of Distributed Cloud systems, reducing the need of configuring everything manually, improving productivity and centralizing development configuration. The deployment manifest is just a bonus so we can test the apps beyond dev.

[@RawCoding]

Development of distributed cloud systems without a deployment strategy? .Net aspire ends at the manifest file, the problem starts at consuming it, for example terraform doesn’t parse json. I like aspire, I think the tooling is the worst part but its early days we’ll see how it pans out..

[@PticostaricaGS]

@@RawCoding Yeah terraform does not consume it yet, the manifest is by design created so that 3rd parties who want to take advantage of it can create their own tools.

[@flibbertigibbet6324]

@@RawCoding While watching your video I kept thinking you were comparing Aspire to another set of development tools and a deployment workflow that already works better for you. I would be interested to see a follow-on video from you that demonstrates a better alternative to Aspire.

[@Format71]

@@RawCoding >Development of distributed cloud systems without a deployment strategy? There are a lot of tooling and effort put into deployment strategies for distributed apps already. As others has mentioned, Aspire is focusing on better developer experience. Makes it a lot easier to clone a project and get it up running on your local machine.

[@MS-kk2ru]

I think that this tool (same as tye) could be great for spinning up local development environment and for now I don't see any advantage to use it in other scenarios

[@prom3theu581]

It’s more than just a tool tbh. The aspire manifest file becomes a single light weight file that describes all components in your solution, including interoperability and how they communicate. There’s awesome power in that.

[@amnesia3490]

perfect explanation, might not look useful as it is now but I can see where it can evaluate in future. Still there are container management systems like Kubernetes where we can create relationships between containers, manage them and visualize relations. Aspire can be nice tool if it creates infrastructure for microservice relations and can be deployed on other platforms than Azure

[@MbgChat]

.Net Aspire is for local dev and testing. It has nothing to do with deployment. Microsoft Radius is for deployment. As for vendor lock in, notice the name is ".NET" Aspire.

[@meetingattender8132]

@raw coding what drawing tool are you using? (not ZoomIt right?)

[@RawCoding]

it's screenbursh on mac

[@johnnylarue3933]

I disagree, Aspire is not over-hyped at all. It does not form any opinion around deployment, so its incorrect to suggest otherwise. AZ is leveraging it to generate BICEP definition files and we use ACA, so it's a great fit. As for roll-back, that's got absolutely nothing to do with Aspire, we maintain our own, and separate CICD services that track and manage roll-back. I have been testing this with our services and love the local dev experience. It's early days but I am seeing unnecessary integrations that I didn't know were occurring, such as not leveraging cached results (in some scenarios) with acquire access tokens. We are using this with Dapr, and will utilize AZ support for ACA deployment. I am sure Aspire will be enriched over time with increased adoption.

[@flibbertigibbet6324]

I concur. The problem is that for many viewers this video will represent someone's first introduction to Aspire when in fact it is a broad critique that Aspire is a partial solution for production calibre deployment pipelines, something it is not designed to do. It would be like criticizing the design of an Airbus A320 for sinking after an hour following an unplanned landing on the Hudson River. The simplified cloud deployment story enabled for Aspire is just a developer convenience for injecting a .Net distributed application direct from desktop into the cloud. The Azure Container Apps target is a perfect fit for this objective.

[@RHV044]

Nice video. I didn't know how limited aspire was on deployments. I look forward to see how the next versions are gonna look like

[@creedscode1656]

Ty for the sum Up. And Ur Takes. For me it looks like they want to be the vercel and nextjs of Microsoft. But with to much enterprises overhead.

[@umilmi81]

Made it to 12:52. A screencap of that frame should be the thumbnail of the video so the watcher knows what kind of meandering stream of consciousness he is in for.

[@gavinlangley8411]

14:37 and had to get me some spaghetti for dinner

[@RawCoding]

🍝

[@alexlo5655]

Hi, this is related to your old posts. Are you planning to update you old videous created for NET 3.1 related to AuthN and AuthZ for NET 8?

[@RawCoding]

Theres a new playlist out already, if you watch it you,ll be good

[@alexlo5655]

@@RawCoding Courses are for NET7. Should not be much diffrences for NET 8?

[@RawCoding]

@alexlo5655 almost not difference

[@alexlo5655]

@@RawCoding Thank you very much for clarification. You AuthN and AuthZ videous are great. Keep publishing.

[@yourockst0ne]

In your opinion, does it "aspire" 😅 to be a competitor to other existing solutions ? Is it going after some market share of kubernetes ?

[@RawCoding]

I dont think its touching kubernetes, it does so much more like managing resources at runtime and being cloud agnostic.

[@johnnyirish9852]

Well the documentation never mentioned micro services. Maybe this is only for the local environment and local testing (I think this is also what was demoed) and for staged deployment you use what you are using now.

[@timheuer]

It is mentioned in the intro paragraph

[@redouane5626]

what's the name and where can I find hoody/sweater thingy you wearing.. i like it

[@RawCoding]

Poncho

[@allinvanguard]

I have yet to try aspire, but I always loved the docker-compose integration of VS and Rider. If it's doing just that with a bit more features on top, then I feel like I could like it. But the entire dev-ops-as-a-service thing? I don't think that this is very useful. I know very little projects which are published on a click-once basis without a custom pipeline behind it.

[@sunefred]

Great summary and I fully agree that Aspire should stay out of deployment. I suspect MS agrees and has included `azd provision` and `azd deploy` mostly for demo purposes. It would be very interesting to hear your opinion on their observability integrations (logging, metrics and tracing). How flexible is this system and how much do you get out of the box?

[@RawCoding]

Yeah Aspire doesn’t really do deployment, its bad wording on my part. As im mostly unhappy with the tooling im really shitting on azd here, but thats what aspire provokes it needs the tooling around it to get there. As for telemetry “observability” its pretty good. And the way the api in .net is setup itll just work.

[@Codewrinkles]

I kind of agree with that. In my opinion the published json manifest with all the configurations is all you need to then port everything fairly easily to almost any CI tool.

[@RawCoding]

I think the fairly easy part wont be so easy

[@Codewrinkles]

@@RawCoding at least easier than without it :))

[@RawCoding]

I don’t know about that, ill have to investigate. My hunch is that having to handle the intermediary format twice for iac and deployment is more work than templating variables.

[@MicheleMassari]

For me you don't have to judge a product at its first version. Also, Microsoft stated that this is only the beginning of a journey. If Aspire will grow from both Microsoft, vendors and the community could become a great tool for develop microservice applications

[@RawCoding]

Im aware this is in preview.

[@rentefald]

Amazing that a new technology gets so much hype, while only the few is actually able to code anything that works in real life.

[@alexxx8338]

I'd like to see what is the alternative, then

[@spottedmahn]

Interesting video, thanks!! 12:15 I doubt long term it will be bicep only, that’s not their style these days IMHO. Sure, easy buttons for the MSFT stack but not lockin.

[@ruslan_yefimov]

It all makes sense tho!

[@Codewrinkles]

I see the beard is growing. Can we expect a long-hari Anton again? :)

[@RawCoding]

Never say never :D

[@joewhiteakeriii5568]

Using Aspire and aspir8 and focusing on ephemeral deployments is what this is for. I think saying aspire is for simple projects and fixating on how this tools attempts to deploy to prod deployment is a misunderstanding of what problems its solving. Bc no one should actually be deploying to prod that easily via a cli. This is clearly a tool for self serving environments for developers testing a new feature, or qa easily having an environment spun up and spun down is what the azd integration is for.

[@abto6914]

Holy Beard🔥🔥🔥

[@BloodXlll]

Та же история. Для локальной разработки это вредно, потому что напрочь отучает разработчиков думать и понимать что как должно быть связано. Для деплоя это не подходит совершенно.

[@paradisefallen8385]

i dont like it

[@redouane5626]

No thanks, this is shitty product with additional problems to deal with, I prefer YAML