Mete Atamel

In my previous post, I talked about how to deploy a containerised ASP.NET Core app to App Engine (flex) on Google Cloud. App Engine (flex) is an easy way to run containers in production: Just send your container and let Google Cloud figure out how to run it at scale. It comes with some nice default features such as versioning, traffic splitting, dashboards and autoscaling. However, it doesn’t give you much control.

I love how easy it is to deploy and run containerized ASP.NET Core apps on App Engine (flex). So much so that, I created a Cloud Minute recently to show you how, here it is.

It basically involves 3 steps:

1. Create your ASP.NET Core app using dotnet command line tool inside Cloud Shell and publish your app to get a self-contained DLL.
2. Containerize your app by creating a Dockerfile, relying on the official App Engine image and pointing to the self-contained DLL of your app.
3. Create an app.yaml file for App Engine and use gcloud to deploy to App Engine.

That’s it! If you want to go through these steps yourself, we also have a codelab for you that you can access here.

gRPC is an RPC framework developed and open-sourced by Google. There are many benefits to gRPC, such as efficient connectivity with HTTP/2, efficient data serialization with Protobuf, bi-directional streaming and more, but one of the biggest benefits is often overlooked: multi-language support.

Out of the box, gRPC supports multiple programming languages : C#, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby and more. In the new microservices world, the multi-language support provides the flexibility you need to implement services in whatever language and framework you like and let gRPC handle the low-level connectivity and data transfer between microservices in an efficient and consistent way.

Originally published in SDN Magazine 131 in February 2017.

Introduction

Until recently, there were two distinct camps in the software world: the Windows (A.K.A. closed) world and the Linux (A.K.A. open) world. In the Linux world, we had tools like the bash shell, Java programming language, Eclipse IDE, MySQL database, and many other open-source projects by Apache. In the Windows world, we had similar, yet distinct tools mainly developed by Microsoft, such as the C# programming language, Visual Studio IDE, SQL Server and PowerShell.

Google Developers Codelabs provide guided coding exercises to get hands-on experience with a wide range of topics such as Android Wear, Firebase and Web. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has its own section, with codelabs for Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Kubernetes and many more.

We’re always working to create new content, and I’m happy to announce that we now have new codelabs for running Windows and .NET apps on GCP, with their own dedicated page. Here’s an overview to help you get started.

I remember the old days where we used to package all our modules into a single app (aka the Monolith), deployed everything all at once and called it an enterprise app. I have to admit, the first time I heard the term enterprise app, it felt special. Suddenly, my little module was not so little anymore. It was part of something bigger and more important, at least that’s what I thought. There was a lot of convention and overhead that came with working in this enterprise app model but it was a small price to pay for consistency, right?

In my previous post, I promised to talk about some good conferences I’m attending or speaking over the coming months. One of those conferences that I’m most excited about is Google Cloud Next’17: Google’s main cloud conference happening March 8–10 in San Francisco.

Last year, I attended that conference as a Noogler. There were a lot of developers and great technical content. This year’s schedule has just been published and it looks even more exciting, especially if you’re a .NET developer!

Google Cloud Shell, my favorite development tool for Google Cloud Platform, just got more awesome with two new features.

First, we recently integrated Eclipse Orion, an online code editor, with Cloud Shell. If you’re not a Vim or Emacs fan, Orion is a welcome addition to Cloud Shell. It enables you to edit code right inside the browser with basic syntax highlighting and minimal effort.

Second, we added .NET Core command line interface tools to Cloud Shell. This is a new cross-platform toolchain for developing .NET Core applications and it can be used to create, run and publish .NET Core apps from the command line.

One of our goals here on the Google Cloud Platform team is to support the broadest possible array of platforms and operating systems. That’s why we’re so excited about the ASP.NET Core, the next generation of the open source ASP.NET web framework built on .NET Core. With it, .NET developers can run their apps cross-platform on Windows, Mac and Linux.

One thing that ASP.NET Core does is allow .NET applications to run in Docker containers. All of a sudden, we’ve gone from Windows-only web apps to lean cross-platform web apps running in containers. This has been great to see!

It’s exciting to see so many options for .NET developers to manage their cloud resources on Google Cloud Platform. Apart from the usual Google Cloud Console, there’s Cloud Tools for Visual Studio, and the subject of this post: Cloud Tools for PowerShell.

PowerShell is a command-line shell and associated scripting language built on the .NET Framework. It’s the default task automation and configuration management tool used in the Windows world. A PowerShell cmdlet is a lightweight command invoked within PowerShell.