Umbraco 9 microservices with Docker and a cluster of Raspberry Pis

Traditional websites are frequently built on a monolithic architecture, where a content management system like Umbraco is the foundation for the content and the presentation layer, user management, permissions, and everything in between. Hosted on IIS server and attached to SQL server, you have everything you need for a website.

As they get more complicated and require additional services and more features the approach is frequently to bolt more and more onto the monolith - adding web APIs, search indexes - all wrapped up into one big architecture which must be deployed at the same time, and with a high level of interdependence. That adds a huge overhead of testing each time a new feature is added, and increases development time.

The Microservices approach is to add new features entirely self-contained but with the ability to interact with the main application in some way - frequently with a common database, or a message queue or some other common backbone. This allows new features to be tested entirely in isolation, and deployed independently of anything else, which means new features can be added with minimal impact on the rest of the application, and changes can be deployed quickly and easily.

To illustrate that approach I’ll be showing how to host a sample microservice application built around the Umbraco CMS but with additional features built on separate containers. The entire application will be hosted on Linux on a series of Raspberry Pis to imitate a high performance hosting platform on multiple servers but at a smaller scale and at a fraction of the cost.

This is more of a demonstration exercise, since nobody in their right mind would actually host an application on a Raspberry Pi, but the great thing about containers is that the same application can be deployed to a cloud like Azure with minimal changes. This is a low cost way of replicating what a production hosting environment would look like but using small, low power but still awesome devices!

The audience will learn a little about
- Networking setup for application hosting
- firewall setup (not the standard home-router)
- Docker
- Linux
- Microservices vs Monolithic architecture
- Architecture differences Arm vs x86
- Umbraco 9 running on .net 5 (6 if Umbraco upgrade)
- Message queues

Building blocks for your applications - hosting Umbraco with containers

In today’s world of high-volume freight shipping and global trade, shipping containers have revolutionized logistics, enabling the rapid movement of goods across vast distances, driving globalization and economic growth on an unprecedented scale.

In our online world, containers have been equally transformative, reshaping how apps and services are developed, deployed, monitored, and integrated with other services. Since transitioning to modern .NET, Umbraco has been able to be hosted on Linux based containers, and in this talk, I’ll explore the specifics of hosting Umbraco webstes on containers using Azure Container apps, and pushing containers to Azure Container Registry.

As the industry moves steadily toward container-based hosting, knowledge and experience in this becomes increasingly important, unlocking benefits like consistency across environments, reduced resource usage, configurable scalability and greater efficiency and sustainability. Plus, containers are really cool 😎

Observing your CMS - Umbraco and Open Telemetry

Remember the days of sprinkling Console.WriteLine or Debug.WriteLine all over your code to figure out what was going wrong? Or drowning in a sea of logs, or even on a rare occasion alert('here')? Say goodbye to the chaos and hello to Observability with OpenTelemetry! 🎉

A unified, configurable and manageable single location to keep a track of all your loggin, but because it's an open standard so you can combine logs from your CMS, your clientside code, any third party logs. It gets better still - open telemetry does't just expose logging - it also supports Traces and Metrics, both of which are powerful tools to keep a track of what's happening in your app - in staging and production environments, but also on your local environment.

So why settle for guesswork and scattered logs when you can have a unified, standardized observability powerhouse? With OpenTelemetry, you’ll see the full story of your application—from every request to every metric—right where you need it. Ready to trace your way to better debugging? Let’s make it happen!

Embracing the Aspirational - .NET Aspire for cloud native app development

.NET Aspire is Microsoft’s new “Opinionated, Cloud-Ready stack for building Observable, Production-ready, Cloud-native applications” – but what does that actually mean? This session will help unpack that for you with some practical examples during which I’ll walk through migrating an existing container-based app to Aspire, highlighting what works well, what needs rethinking, and how Aspire can streamline development workflows. I’ll also explore the tools that come with Aspire, the local development story, and what deployment looks like for real-world applications.

This session is aimed at developers curious about Aspire and those already building cloud-native applications who want to know how this new stack can enhance their projects. Expect practical advice, honest insights, and a look at how Aspire might just change the way you approach cloud-native development.

Creating Containers around Umbraco - Hosting using Docker anywhere!

Hosting can be a hassle, especially if you are looking to host your sites service agnostically. Even Azure and AWS have outages so one of the best options for hosting websites is using Docker containers.

In this talk, I'll be looking through the new inclusion of Docker support with the Umbraco .NET Templates in v14, and go through an overview of the requirements for hosting a website bult around containers in Azure, although it would be equally applicable to any hosting provider with contianer support!

We'll cover some of the pitfalls and gotchas around hosting a website in containers - like considering options for databases, storing media and log files, monitoring. Everything you need to get you started hosting your own Umbraco sites with containers.

Umbraco + .NET Maui : A unified CMS for your website and app

What's the easiest way of expanding your reach with your audience, especially if you already have a website? A smartphone app!

Umbraco CMS, which now has multi-platform friendly features like the Content Delivery API, and support for webhooks make it easier for you to easily and simply add new content channels to your website. In this talk I'll go through how you can easily build and extend cross-platform mobile apps with .NET MAUI, the Multi-platform App User Interface, Microsoft's latest framework for mobile development.

I'll cover how to use the content delivery API and webhooks to handle communication between your CMS and the mobile app, both pulling content via the API, and pushing via webhooks.

There will be demos, there will be a public demo repository on github where you can see the code from this talk and there will be a general feel of Awesomeness and inspiration!

Umbraco + .NET Maui - Multi-platform apps powered by your CMS

In this session I'll be using the latest Umbraco Content delivery API with a cross platform app built with .NET MAUI to showcase how content delivered headlessly can be consumed by a mobile app on windows, iOs and MacOs as well as Android.

We'll consider the strengths and weaknesses of the content delivery API as well as looking at some of the alternatives available to it.

Github Actions : Continuous Improvement / Continuous Delight

Everyone wants an easier life, right? It's a common phrase used in development circles : If you do something more than once, automate it. Your future self will thank you! One way to do this is with Github Actions.

Github actions allow you to build, test, package and deploy your code easily and quickly - It's a straight forward process, there's a great community around it and it's free (within certain contstraints). In this talk I'm going to automate building a simple contact form package, publish it to nuget. Once it's on there, I'll use it in a sample website, and show how to deploy that website to Azure using Github Actions.

The code for all this will be made available open source after Codegarden so you can go away and try this for yourself, and you can use the actions to build your own libraries, packages, and deploy your own sites. The only problem left will be choosing which awesome project you work on next with all the time you save :)

Docker is a gateway drug - Just say YES to containerisation

As an 20 year veteran .NET developer, who had spent a lot of time building web applications hosted on virtual machines running IIS - first using WebForms and then MVC, and when Docker first came along, although I though it was cool, I largely ignored it for many years. Until one day I didn't ....

In this talk I will take the audience through a journey of discovery - learning about docker and containerisation, about micro-service architecture (the good and the bad), about how it can help the local development process, how it helps teams, and some of the really cool things it can do. In 10 tips and tricks, I'll go through some of the things I've learned, that have helped me, and that I think are just plain cool.

Without giving away too many spoilers it will involve linux, raspberry Pis, and and a certain mid 90s first person shooter, although not all at the same time.

I've given a version of this talk previously at ddd south west and received generally good feedback from developers inexperienced with docker and those familiar with it.

Containers and Umbraco - using Docker to host a load balanced Umbraco website

In this workshop I'll be looking at how to use Umbraco in a load-balanced container-based application. Containers have revolutionised how modern scalable cloud-hosted applications are build, and this will give the audience a good foundation on the technology used and the applications for it.

Docker is a tool that's revolutionised cloud based application development and is used to build some of the biggest scalable, fault-tolerant cloud based applications.

I'll cover some of the concepts of what containers are, how they work, and how micro-architecture based applications allow for some pretty awesome scalable and robust application architectures.

During the workshop we'll create and host a container application using the latest Umbraco version and run it on a local Docker Desktop environment.