Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Category: Developer Tools

.NET Observability with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray: Part 3 – Distributed Trace

Building a well-architected .NET application goes beyond just coding and deploying. You must monitor performance, trace transactions, collect logs, gather metrics, and trigger alarms when metrics breach thresholds. To achieve this, you can design and implement telemetry to enable observability capabilities. In the first post of the series, I covered the implementation of metrics, and […]

.NET observability with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray: Part 1 — Metrics

Building a well-architected .NET application goes beyond just coding and deploying. You must monitor performance, trace transactions, collect logs, gather metrics, and trigger alarms when metrics breach thresholds. To achieve this, you can design and implement telemetry to enable observability capabilities. This post is the first in a series of three posts in which I […]

Embedding Amazon QuickSight analytics in .NET applications

In this blog post for .NET developers, we will discuss step-by-step instructions on how to embed Amazon QuickSight analytics in your .NET applications using QuickSight APIs and make them available for Amazon Cognito authenticated users. Amazon QuickSight Embedded analytics is a feature of QuickSight that applies data analytics to the applications used by your end users, analysts, and business leaders. QuickSight Embedded provides […]

Using Amazon CodeCatalyst blueprints to build and deploy .NET serverless applications

In part 2 of this blog post series, we show how to set up a project in Amazon CodeCatalyst and collaborate on the coding, building, testing, and deployment of .NET serverless applications in your AWS environments. Consider reviewing the first post, which introduced CodeCatalyst. It explains the compute fleet options that are available for your […]

Using Amazon CodeCatalyst blueprints to build and deploy .NET web applications to AWS

In this blog post, the first in a series of posts about using .NET with Amazon CodeCatalyst, we will guide you through building and deploying a .NET 6.0 ASP.NET Core web API to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) using the ASP.NET Core web API project blueprint included with CodeCatalyst and the AWS .NET deployment […]

How to use AWS App2Container to automate the setup of Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines

Introduction In this blog post, we will walk through how to automate the creation of an Azure DevOps release pipeline that deploys containerized applications to AWS. This solution will save you time and effort if you’re using Azure DevOps for version control or CI/CD and if you’re modernizing your applications using containers. We will use […]

Build, package, and publish .NET C# Lambda functions with the AWS CDK

CDK offers a high-level abstraction to define AWS resources using modern programming languages. Among its components, it provides aws-s3-assets, which is a high level construct that abstracts packaging AWS Lambda functions. The default behavior of this construct is to zip all the content into a folder and upload it to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. That works great for Lambda runtimes like Python or Node.js, which do not require code compilation, but for .NET, Java, or Go, which requires code compilation, you’ll need extra steps to restore external dependencies, compile the code, and publish the binary. This post will explore how to streamline building, packaging, and publishing .NET Lambda functions using AWS CDK.

How to load .NET configuration from AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. It enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets used by your application, eliminating the need to hard-code sensitive information in plain text. You can use the Secrets Manager client to retrieve secrets using AWS SDK for .NET. However, this would require code changes and add to the complexity of your code, as you need to invoke the client whenever you need to read data stored in Secrets Manager. Instead, you can use the .NET configuration system – an extensible API used to read and manage application secrets. This lets developers use a familiar API to access secrets in secure storage and reduce complexity by using a single code path for all environments. Additionally, the provider lets existing applications move to Secrets Manager without making any code changes.

Using SMB CSI Driver on Amazon EKS Windows nodes

Back in 2020, we first published a blog post on how Windows pods on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS) could access Amazon FSx for Windows File Server as persistent storage. This was accomplished by using AWS Systems Manager to automate the domain join. In the background, a feature from SMB protocol called “SMB Global […]

Building Windows containers with AWS CodePipeline on AWS GovCloud (US)

Many AWS GovCloud (US) customers and their partners use AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild to build Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines on AWS. Building on AWS GovCloud (US), however, introduces a few restrictions, not present in other AWS Regions, when implementing pipelines for Windows container applications. In this blog post, I will explain what these […]