Over the last few years, a paradigm shift has happened in the way applications are designed, in the form of suites of smaller and independently deployable services, also known as microservice architecture or just microservices. The intent is to develop simpler and independent services, to release them quickly, and to release them often and ensure that if one service is down then other services are not impacted, making the app more robust, reliable, and highly scalable. In the spirit of this new philosophy, and keeping up with the latest and greatest in the technology space, we will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Introduction to microservices
• Handy things to know
• Blazor—a new experiment from the ASP.NET team
• What's coming in .NET Core 2.1

We have a lot to cover, so let's start with microservices.