This document discusses strategies for taking .NET Core container solutions from development to production quickly and reliably. It demonstrates using containerization with Docker to achieve speedy development cycles through practices like trunk-based development in isolated containers. The document also covers important aspects for production such as monitoring, logging, security and treating infrastructure as code. Automating the entire pipeline from code to production deployment in minutes is the overall goal.

1. 1
Taking your .NET Core
container solution
from laptop to
production
in under a minute
Alex Thissen

2. 2
Alex Thissen
Cloud Architect
Xpirit Netherlands
@alexthissen – athissen@xpirit.com

3. 3
Demo
application

4. 4
Web APIWeb API
containercontainer
Leaderboard
Microservice
Identity
Microservice
ASP.NET Core
Web App
Client applications (browser)
Web
Page
Arcade
cabinets
reporting
high-scores

5. 5
Then there was a bug

6. 6
Challenge
Development to production under a minute
(and many times per day)

7. 7
Friends don’t let friends
use Publish in Visual Studio

8. 8

9. 9
What? Who?

10. 10
Convince people
Actually, involve less people

11. 11
Back to drawing
board

12. 12
Don't just automate. Rethink your approach

13. 13
Speed: Shift left Stable and predictable
Repeatable: Automate everything

14. 14
Demo: Tracing bug
Find details on error details
Narrow down location
Start work for team

15. 15
DevOps using container technology

16. 16

17. 17
Better isolation from
hypervisor virtualization
Container
management
Docker
Engine
Compute

18. 18

19. 19
Inner loop
Run
Code
Validate
Outer loop

20. 20
Demo: Fixing bug
Isolated development using containers
Branching strategy
Inner loop
Run
Code
Validate

21. 21
Trunk based development Shortlived branches
Full traceability

22. 22
Demo: Trunk based
development
Branch policies
Reviewers and approvers
PR Build

23. 23
Contains steps to:
Same pipeline for
PR and CI

24. 24
Web API
Web App
SQL Server
on Linux

25. 25
Order of files matters:
last one wins
docker-compose
-f "docker-compose.yml"
-f "docker-compose.override.yml"
-p composition up -d

26. 26
Push and store your images to centralized location
Each image is in its own repository

27. 27

28. 28
Demo: Build pipelines
Tasks involved
Pull Request build conditions
Governance and compliance checks

30. 30
Container cluster
Examples of external resources
Solution composed of
multiple containers
Different compositions
per environment
Web
Frontend
Web API Backend service

31. 31

32. 32
Environment:
e.g. developer laptop,
staging or production cluster
Container images are immutable
Environments are not same
docker run –it –-env key=value alexthissen/gamingwebapp
Container image
{
"ConnectionString": "Server=tcp:…",
"Logging": {
"IncludeScopes": false,
"LogLevel": {
"Default": "Warning"
}
}
}
appsettings.json

33. 33
Bootstrapping environment variables
public Startup(IHostingEnvironment env)
{
var builder = new ConfigurationBuilder()
.SetBasePath(env.ContentRootPath)
.AddJsonFile("appsettings.json", optional: false, reloadOnChange: true)
.AddJsonFile($"appsettings.{env.EnvironmentName}.json", optional: true)
.AddEnvironmentVariables();
Configuration = builder.Build();
}
ENV variablesSettings files

34. 35
Development container cluster
Redis cache
External
resources
Web
Frontend
Web API Backend service
SQL
Server
on Linux RabbitMQ

35. 36
Managed
master
nodes
+ VMs

36. 37
Create deployment file to apply on cluster
Elaborate scenarios involve multiple environments

37. 38

38. 39
Demo: Releasing
Release pipeline
Triggers and approval

39. 40
Want to go even faster?

40. 41
API v1.0*
Version with new
functionality
behind feature
toggle
Works well with CI/CD
Traffic management
API v1.0
Original version
Traffic manager
Directs between versions

41. 42
Turn functionality on/off
Deploy without releasing
Monitor behavior
FeatureToggle
Version 4.0.2

42. 43
Building resilient applications

43. 44
Resiliency: design for failure
Determine your strategy for resiliency
Focus on dependencies outside of your own container
Cloud and containers:
Transient errors
are a fact,
not a possibility

44. Monitoring
Using telemetry, logging and instrumentation

45. 46
Instrumentation not optional
Who wants to fly in the blind?

46. 47
Individual applications Entire landscape
Application New Relic AppMetrics
Insights

47. 48
Message templates
Log providers supporting semantic logging
// Placeholders in template become queryable custom data
logger.LogInformation("Searching with {SearchLimit} results.", limit);

48. 49
Get your log levels right
Register logging providers (sinks)
Log Levels
5 – Critical
4 – Error
3 – Warning
2 – Information
1 – Debug
0 – Trace
loggerFactory.AddApplicationInsights(…);
loggerFactory.AddAzureWebAppDiagnostics(…)
loggerFactory.AddEventSourceLogger();
Tips and tweaks
High performance logging with LogMessage.Define
Use scopes for bundling logs messages
Apply filters per category prefix to reduce noise

49. 50
Leverage existing resources
Appropriate filters
for each sink
Metrics and monitoring
e.g. Application Insights
AppMetrics
Log indexers
e.g. OMS Log Analytics,
Splunk, ELK stack
Application logs and traces
File or blob based logs
ETW, IntelliTrace,
Azure App Service logging
Your Web API
Instrumented with
log output

50. 51
Health of your application

51. 52
Specific endpoints to query
status of Web API
Middleware exposes health details
Combine with monitoring solution to alert ops
Microsoft.AspNetCore.
Diagnostics.HealthChecks
Version 2.2.0
App.Metrics.AspNetCore.Health
Version 2.0.0
services
.AddHealthChecks()
.AddPrometheusGatewayPublisher("http://pushgateway:9091/metrics", "pushgateway")
.AddCheck<CertificateHealthCheck>("ssl")
.AddDbContextCheck<LeaderboardContext>("Database");

52. 53

53. 54
Security and compliance

54. 55
Everything in Docker ecosystem is inspectable

55. 56
Configuration
Where would you leave sensitive data?
Production
appsettings.
development.json
Cluster secrets
docker-
compose.debug.yml
docker-
compose.production.yml
User Secrets Azure KeyVault
appsettings.
secrets.json
Connection
strings
Passwords
appsettings.
secrets.json

56. 57
Provisioning Azure resources

57. 58
Automate everything
Treat infrastructure as code

58. 59

59. 60
Questions and Answers

60. 61
Resources
https://dot.net/
https://www.visualstudio.com
https://github.com/microsoft/dotnet
https://pages.xpirit.com/magazine2018