Containers are popular at the moment as they provide an efficient, lightweight, and self-contained approach for packaging applications with their dependencies while re-using the underlying operating system files and resources.

They are a perfect fit for microservice architectures, but can also be used for any other application archetypes. They work exceptionally well together with ASP.NET Core 3 applications since both have been conceived with modularity, performance, scalability, lightweight nature, and efficiency in mind.

We must note that there are currently different containers available for use by the developer community such as CoreOS rkt, Apache Mesos Containerizers, and LXC (short for Linux Containers), but the most popular by far are Docker containers. 

Both Docker containers and the ASP.NET Core 3 framework provide full cross-platform support (Windows, Linux, and macOS). Furthermore, you can host your containers on-premises and in the cloud. You can use Azure, for example, either via Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) deployments or via Azure Container Service, which is being deprecated in favor of Azure Kubernetes Service, which additionally allows for mixing and matching different operating systems and technologies.

Microservices architecture, cross-platform support, and other features might make ASP.NET Core 3 a great framework to use, but how good is it if it has such great features without a matching great performance? How does ASP.NET Core 3 fare in terms of being able to handle applications that need to grow? We will look at both performance and scalability for ASP.NET Core 3 in the next section.