AWS Announces Streamlined Deployment for .NET Apps

This past July 6, 2022, Amazon announced the release of two new technologies that enable the streamlined deployment of .NET applications on Amazon Web Services. The new AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio as well as the new AWS Deploy Tool for the .NET CLI enable you to get your .NET application up and running in just a few steps without needing a lot of expertise in AWS.

These new tools allow you to deploy ASP.NET Core applications, long-running services, scheduled tasks, and Web Assembly applications that are built with .NET Core 3.1 and above including the .NET 7 preview. They can also be used to deploy any cloud-native .NET applications to AWS. However, .NET Lambda functions are not supported at this time.

“At the time of this release, we support deployments to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) using AWS Fargate compute engine, AWS App Runner, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. We also support hosting Blazor WebAssembly applications in Amazon S3 using Amazon CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN),” the company explained in the announcement.

Getting started in Visual Studio and the .NET CLI

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio works within the Visual Studio graphical development environment by providing a new Publish to AWS wizard. The same deployment functionality is also available in the .NET CLI by installing the AWS Deploy Tool for .NET. 

Both .NET tools provide the following capabilities:

• Recommend the AWS compute requirements that are best suited for your application.
• Generate a Dockerfile if required by your AWS compute requirements.
• Build and package your application as required by the AWS compute recommendations.
• Generate documented AWS CDK deployment projects that can be used with version control.
• Push the same application bundle to different environments.

To get started with these new AWS tools for deploying .NET applications, install the latest version of the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio from the Visual Studio Marketplace. To learn more about AWS deployment for .NET, you can check out the About the AWS Deploy Tool support page.