That's it: we are almost at the end of the book, which means that we have nearly finished the entire application development life cycle, and thus, customers will be able to use your applications soon! Be proud, because after reading and understanding this penultimate chapter of the book, you will have acquired strong skills to create and deploy your own mind-blowing applications with strong technical foundations!

Let's recap: from the beginning of the book until now, you have seen how to set up a development environment, how to use the various features of ASP.NET Core 3 to develop modern web applications, how to connect them to a database via Entity Framework Core, and, finally, in the previous two chapters, how to secure them against any malicious cybercriminals.

Now, we need to talk about the last step in the development cycle, which consists of hosting and deploying your applications once they are production-ready.

We will first look at the general hosting of our application, before we go into the specifics of deploying our application into the cloud, on two of the most common platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure; and finally, we will look at using Docker containers to host our applications.

The goal of this chapter is to explain the different options you have in hosting your application, how to choose the right ones, and how to deploy your ASP.NET Core 3 web applications, using the most current technologies and cloud providers.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Hosting applications
• Deploying applications in AWS
• Deploying applications in Microsoft Azure
• Deploying applications into Docker containers