News

AWS Eases .NET Deployments with CLI Tool Preview

• By David Ramel
• 03/19/2021

Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week released the first preview of an open source .NET deployment tool for the .NET CLI, aimed at easing the process of deploying .NET Web applications on its cloud.

The project's GitHub site describes it as opinionated tooling designed to help even users with little AWS knowledge deploy .NET apps:

The tool suggests the right AWS compute service to deploy your application to. It then builds and packages your application as required by the chosen compute service, generates the deployment infrastructure, deploys your application by using the Cloud Development Kit (CDK), and displays the endpoint.

According to a March 17 blog post, it supports both C# and F# code and works with .NET Core/.NET 5 Web apps, back-end services and Blazor WebAssembly.

Being "cloud native," the supported apps run on Linux-based virtualized compute services so developers don't have to mess with legacy Window baggage. That means the tool does not work with:

• .NET Framework (for those apps, there's the .NET Porting Assistant)
• Desktop
• Xamarin
• Other Windows-native applications

It also doesn't support .NET AWS Lambda functions, but that tooling is going to get baked in eventually.

AWS said it has been soliciting customer feedback on how to up its .NET app deployment game in view of the increasing complexity of both AWS and .NET environments, which apparently made the process too hard to do with existing tools. The team found that the feedback could be summarized in three common questions:

• What's the right service for my application? AWS has an abundance of compute services and, if you are new to AWS, sometimes it's hard to know which one to use.
• How do I reduce the learning curve? Once you select a compute service, there is still a lot to learn in order to build, package and deploy your application. It's often both overwhelming and time-consuming.
• How do I promote the best deployment practices within my team? Deploying from Visual Studio is great for prototyping and initial testing. However, once customers move beyond that phase, they want to promote their organization's best practices across the teams by using automated deployments.

That caused a 180-degree shift in its approach, according to AWS: "Instead of providing a plethora of tooling for each of our compute services, we want to have a single tool that starts with the .NET application; a tool that provides an opinion and guides you to the right service for your application."

AWS noted that the developer preview mainly addresses the first two items on that feedback list above, with the second item, "How do I promote the best deployment practices within my team?" being tackled with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). That experience will be totally managed at first, but later will be opened up to let developers get a better handle on the features and functionality.

More information is available here.