December 3, 2019

.NET Developers and the Path to Kubernetes

Many .NET developers working on enterprise applications are feeling stuck doing traditional .NET web development; for example, doing WCF development, maybe some ASP.NET Web Forms, or a mishmash of MVC and other tech.

The new hype in the development world is not just about a new framework like it has been in the past. In other words, the hype is not just about ASP.NET Core… it’s also about a new runtime, containerization, microservices, and Kubernetes.

It’s a whole range of topics. It’s inconceivable to think that a .NET developer would pick up all these new technologies at once.

Here’s a version of my path with adaptations:

• Learn dependency injection and unit testing
• Learn ASP.NET Core with .NET Core
• Learn a scripting language. Powershell is easiest on a Windows OS.
• Learn Unix basics
• Learn Docker and Containerization .NET Core apps
• Learn Azure DevOps or another form of CI/CD pipelines
• Learn Kubernetes fundamentals and deployments
• Learn how to use an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool for telemetry

It a long and fun journey ahead. There’s checkpoints you can take in between so that you can still deliver projects without the end result of Kubernetes.