Microservices with .NET
Build and deploy microservices with .NET — service communication, API gateways, distributed data management, and containerization.
50 min•By Priygop Team•Last updated: Feb 2026
Microservices Communication
- Synchronous (HTTP/gRPC): Direct request-response — REST APIs for external communication, gRPC for internal service-to-service (10x faster than JSON/HTTP)
- Asynchronous (Message Queues): RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, Apache Kafka — publish events, subscribers process independently. Resilient to service failures
- API Gateway: Ocelot or YARP in .NET — single entry point for clients. Handles routing, rate limiting, authentication, load balancing, and API composition
- Service Discovery: Consul, Kubernetes DNS, or Azure Service Fabric — services register themselves and discover each other dynamically
- Circuit Breaker: Polly library — prevents cascade failures. If a service is failing, stop calling it temporarily and return a fallback response
- Distributed Transactions: Saga pattern using choreography (events) or orchestration (coordinator service) — avoid distributed transactions (2PC) when possible
.NET Microservice Stack
- ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs: Lightweight HTTP endpoints — perfect for microservices. Lower ceremony than controllers
- Entity Framework Core: ORM for data access — each service owns its database (Database per Service pattern). Use migrations for schema evolution
- MassTransit: Abstraction over message brokers (RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, Kafka) — simplifies Saga, routing, and consumer management
- Docker + Kubernetes: Containerize with multi-stage Dockerfiles. Deploy to K8s with Helm charts. Use Dapr for cross-cutting concerns
- Health Checks: Built-in ASP.NET Core health check endpoints — /health/ready, /health/live for Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes
- Distributed Tracing: OpenTelemetry with Jaeger/Zipkin — trace requests across services to identify bottlenecks and failures