Book excerpt: At a time when nearly every vertical, regardless of domain, seems to need software running in the cloud to make money, microservices provide the agility and drastically reduced time to market you require. This hands-on guide shows you how to create, test, compile, and deploy microservices, using the ASP.NET Core free and open-source framework. Along the way, you’ll pick up good, practical habits for building powerful and robust services. Building microservices isn’t about learning a specific framework or programming language; it’s about building applications that thrive in elastically scaling environments that don't have host affinity, and that can start and stop at a moment’s notice. This practical book guides you through the process. Learn test-driven and API-first development concepts Communicate with other services by creating and consuming backing services such as databases and queues Build a microservice that depends on an external data source Learn about event sourcing, the event-centric approach to persistence Use ASP.NET Core to build web applications designed to thrive in the cloud Build a service that consumes, or is consumed by, other services Create services and applications that accept external configuration Explore ways to secure ASP.NET Core microservices and applications