In my previous blog post, I walked through the process of creating a lightweight microservice in ASP.NET 5 that builds in a cross-platform fashion, so it can run on Windows, Linux, and OS X. I’m going to glaze over how completely amazing it is that we now live in a time where I can write cross-platform microservices in C# using emacs.
If you’re building microservices, then there’s a good chance you’re thinking about deploying that microservice out into some Platform as a Service provider. For obvious reasons, my favorite PaaS target is Cloud Foundry (you can use any of the commercial providers that rest atop the CF Foundation like Pivotal Web Services, IBM Bluemix, HP, etc).
Thankfully, there is a community supported buildpack for ASP.NET 5. I believe it’s up to date with beta 8 of ASP.NET 5, so there is a minor modification you’ll have to make in order to get your application to launch in Cloud Foundry.
First, go into the project.json file and make sure your commands section looks like this:
"commands": {
"web": "Microsoft.AspNet.Server.Kestrel",
"kestrel": "Microsoft.AspNet.Server.Kestrel"
},
The reason for this is that the buildpack expects to use the default launch command from pre-RC1, kestrel. If you’ve used the RC1 project generator, then the default kestrel launch command is just called web. The easy fix for this, as shown above, is just to create a duplicate command called kestrel. Now you can launch your app with dnx web or dnx kestrel, and that’ll make the buildpack happy.
With that one tiny little change, you can now push your application to the cloud:
cf push zombieservice -b https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/asp.net5-buildpack.git
If you’re not familiar with the cf command line or Cloud Foundry, go check out Pivotal Web Services, a public commercial implementation of Cloud Foundry.
It will take a little while to deal with uploading the app, gathering the dependencies, and then starting. But, it works! To recap, just so this sinks in: I can write an ASP.NET microservice, in C#, using my favorite IDE (vi!), on my Mac, and deploy it to a container in the cloud, which is running Linux. Oh yeah, and if I really feel like it I can run this on Windows, too.
A few years ago, I would never have believed that something like this would be possible.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
