Introduction

.NET Core and ASP.NET Core offer several advantages over traditional .NET development. You should use .NET Core for your server applications if some or all of the following are important to your application’s success:

• Cross-platform support
• Use of microservices
• Use of Docker containers
• High performance and scalability requirements
• Side-by-side versioning of .NET versions by application on the same server

Traditional .NET applications can and do support many of these requirements, but ASP.NET Core and .NET Core have been optimized to offer improved support for the above scenarios.

More and more organizations are choosing to host their web applications in the cloud using services like Microsoft Azure. You should consider hosting your application in the cloud if the following are important to your application or organization:

• Reduced investment in data center costs (hardware, software, space, utilities, server management, etc.)
• Flexible pricing (pay based on usage, not for idle capacity)
• Extreme reliability
• Improved app mobility; easily change where and how your app is deployed
• Flexible capacity; scale up or down based on actual needs

Building web applications with ASP.NET Core, hosted in Azure, offers many competitive advantages over traditional alternatives. ASP.NET Core is optimized for modern web application development practices and cloud hosting scenarios. In this guide, you’ll learn how to architect your ASP.NET Core applications to best take advantage of these capabilities.

Version

This eBook has been revised to cover version 2.2 of ASP.NET Core and .NET Core.