Microservices In C#
Shawn Phy / July 2025 (344 Words, 2 Minutes)
Introduction
Microservices are a way of breaking down a large application into smaller, more manageable pieces. This allows for greater flexibility and easier maintenance. In this post we will look at how to implement->deploy microservices in C#.
The cloud drives today’s application development and IT systems management. Modern cloud applications need to be fast, agile, massively scalable, and reliable.
Using containers can help you deploy applications that meet all of those requirements. But putting an application into a container without following a strategic design pattern is like getting into a vehicle and hoping to find your way to a new city without using a map or GPS. You might end up at your destination, but the route probably won’t be direct or the most efficient.
A microservices architecture is useful in this scenario. Microservices give you an approach to software development and deployment that’s perfectly suited to the agility, scalability, and reliability requirements of modern cloud applications.
What is a microservices architecture?
In a microservices architecture, a large application is split up into a set of smaller services. Each service runs in its own process and communicates with other processes by using protocols like HTTP/HTTPS, WebSocket, or Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). Each microservice implements a specific, end-to-end domain or business capability within a certain context boundary. Each microservice must be developed autonomously and must be independently deployable. Finally, each microservice should own its related domain data model and domain logic. Microservices can be based on different data storage technologies (SQL, NoSQL) and different programming languages.
Here are some key characteristics of microservices:
- They’re small, independent, and loosely coupled.
- Each microservice has a separate code base that a small development team can manage.
- They’re deployed independently. A team can update an existing microservice without rebuilding and redeploying the entire application.
- They persist their data or the external state in their respective databases. Unlike in a monolithic architecture, microservices don’t share databases.
- They communicate with each other by using well-defined APIs. Internal implementation details of each service are hidden from other services.
- They support polyglot programming. For example, the microservices that make up a web application don’t need to share the same technology stack, libraries, or frameworks.
What role do containers play?
Containerization is an approach to software development in which an application or service, its dependencies, and its configuration (abstracted as deployment manifest files) are packaged together as a container image. You can test the containerized application as a unit, and deploy it as a container image instance on the host operating system.
Software containers act as a standard unit of software deployment that can contain different code and dependencies. This is similar to how shipping containers transport goods of all kinds by ship, train, or truck. Developers and IT professionals can use containerized software to deploy code and dependencies across environments with little or no modification.
If it sounds like containerizing an application might be a great way to implement the microservices architecture pattern, it is. The benefits of using containers line up almost exactly with the benefits of using a microservices architecture.