Pivotal Contributes Steeltoe to the .NET Foundation

It’s official: the Steeltoe open source project is joining the .NET Foundation. That’s the news from Microsoft’s Connect() conference in New York City today.

What is Steeltoe?

Steeltoe is a set of libraries that help .NET developers build cloud-native applications and microservices. The project extends popular projects like Spring Cloud and NetflixOSS to the world of .NET on Windows and .NET Core on Linux.

This is an exciting moment for us here at Pivotal. We’re well-known as the primary sponsor of the Spring Framework, including Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. Spring helps Java developers incorporate the latest cloud-native patterns into their applications. As we watched developers attempt to modernize their .NET apps too, we decided to invest in bringing these same cloud-native patterns to .NET. The result? Pivotal launched the SteeltoeOSS project in 2016. Since then, the project has grown, reaching over 125,000 Nuget package downloads.

Steeltoe’s move to the .NET Foundation is big news for .NET teams. And it’s the latest milestone in Pivotal’s vision to transform how the world builds .NET applications. Let’s take a look at the journey so far.

The .NET Renaissance Meets the Microservices Revolution

We’ve written about the .NET revival underway. The .NET ecosystem has embraced open-source culture, tools, and business models. At the same time, businesses have adopted microservices patterns. This approach yields exponential benefits for feature velocity.

Steeltoe is firmly at the center of these movements.

Companies are standardizing on cross-platform frameworks like .NET Core for new development. You’ve read all about this trend.

What’s less talked about: how these organizations are modernizing their existing portfolio of custom .NET apps.

Steeltoe works with .NET Core and the .NET Framework. As such, we’re seeing Steeltoe used to build new cloud-native applications, and  to migrate, integrate and modernize existing apps for the cloud.

Bringing a Bit of NetflixOSS to .NET

Here’s a look at what’s being contributed to the .NET Foundation. Steeltoe includes:

• A .NET client for Netflix Eureka, so your microservices can register themselves and discover other registered services.

• A custom .NET Configuration Provider that utilizes Spring Cloud Config Server to pull in config values stored in Git, the filesystem, or Hashicorp Vault.

• A .NET implementation of Netflix Hystrix, a proven circuit breaker implementation with rich metrics and monitoring features.

• Connectors that simplify the use of common backing services. Steeltoe Connectors automatically configure and wire up connections to common services like Redis, RabbitMQ, MySQL and Postgres.

• Bundled security providers that enable you to easily integrate ASP.NET Core authentication and authorization features with Cloud Foundry security services.

• A management library, inspired by the Spring Boot Actuator project, for operating and troubleshooting microservices in production.

All of these features enable .NET developers to build apps that take full advantage of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a cloud-native platform for modern apps.

Why the .NET Foundation is the Right Place for Steeltoe

This announcement also illustrates Microsoft’s embrace of the open source community. Just over three years ago, Microsoft created the .NET Foundation. Its mission: to encourage open source community, collaboration, and engagement around the .NET framework.

Since then, Microsoft has open-sourced the .NET Framework, compilers, and related projects like Mono and Xamarin. .NET Core, Microsoft’s new cross-platform development framework, is also open source under the .NET Foundation. Steeltoe fits in nicely with this impressive collection of projects.

Enterprises want an OSS future for their apps. .NET, Cloud Foundry, and now Steeltoe offer a compelling path forward. Dev teams can adopt Steeltoe with confidence, knowing the future of the toolkit is in good hands.

Want to know more about Steeltoe? Start with the sample apps.

If you’re interested in contributing, the Steeltoe team welcomes pull requests. Join us on the web at https://steeltoe.io or in Slack at https://slack.steeltoe.io to find out more.

SteeltoeOSS is open source under the Apache license.

About the Author

Zach Brown does product strategy and marketing at Pivotal. He’s responsible for Steeltoe and the Pivotal Cloud Foundry .NET developer experience.

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