Microservice architecture, most commonly referred to as just microservices, is a currently common way of designing and building software applications in a modular way with the single responsibility principle in mind. It stresses having service modules that are not tightly coupled with other services when implementing business solutions that are service-oriented. Microservices can be used to build e-commerce systems, business applications, and IoT. You will find them quite a popular implementation especially when working with distributed applications.

ASP.NET Core 3 is the best candidate when you want to embrace this system architecture. The ASP.NET Core 3 framework is lightweight and its API surface can be minimized to the scope of a specific microservice. A microservice architecture also allows you to mix technologies across service boundaries, enabling for a gradual transition to ASP.NET Core.

Notice that microservices built with ASP.NET Core 3 can work together with services using other technologies such as the full classic .NET Framework, Java, Ruby, and even other more legacy technologies. This is a big advantage when you need to progressively transform monolithic applications into more (micro)service-oriented applications.

You are not bound to the specific underlying infrastructure; instead, you have a wide range of choices since ASP.NET Core 3 supports nearly all of the technologies that you can think of today. Additionally, you can modify the infrastructure when needed so there is no technological lock-in for applications that have been developed based on it.

Your primary choice for orchestrating and managing microservices written in C# efficiently and at a high scale, on-premises, and in the cloud should be Microsoft Service Fabric, also known as Azure Service Fabric. It was conceived exactly for that and has been used by Microsoft for various Azure services (such as SQL Database) for many years already.

A microservices Docker container approach might also fit your needs, and we are going to explain its use cases in the next section. To sum it up, ASP.NET Core 3 is the ideal choice for implementing and hosting your microservices in any kind of technical environment.