.NET 8 brought a lot of improvements for developers and maturity to the Azure serverless container ecosystem. So, this talk will cover these changes and explain how you can apply them to your projects. Another reason for this talk is the re-invention of Serverless from a DevOps perspective as a Platform Engineering trend with Backstage, Tilt, etc. So, now is a perfect time to have a fresh look into developer productivity tooling.

Key topics:

- NET Aspire framework and Ahead-of-Time (AoT) Compilation impact on .NET applications.
- Azure Functions' new Flex Consumption plan and performance impact of the .NET Isolated model with AoT.
- Usage of AspNetCore.RateLimiting instead of Polly, benefits of primary constructors and lambda default parameters.
- Azure Container Apps(ACA) maturity bridges the gap between Kubernetes and ACA, introducing resiliency out-of-box, jobs, stateful workloads, and the use of GPU-powered computing.
- Distributed Application Runtime(DAPR) updates to build serverless-like applications on Kubernetes and ACA.
- Conductor and Catalyst tooling to make your DAPR-powered application portable between clouds.
- The role of .NET Chiseled Containers in minimizing attack surfaces for your cloud applications.
- [Testcontainers.com](http://testcontainers.com/) that improve the quality of your applications.
- Comparison of Microsoft tooling in comparison with CNCF.
- Bootstrapping your own private AI LLM with project data you need for great results.

Join this talk to learn how to use the newest and greatest tooling for developers and how to build reliable cloud applications without introducing extra complexity in 2024.