.NET Developers and the Path to Kubernetes

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.