David Fowler explores how Aspire addresses ‘manifest sprawl’ by unifying application configuration and deployment manifests into a single, C#-coded model, streamlining workflows for developers.

Taming Manifest Sprawl with Aspire

Written by David Fowler

Manifest sprawl is a challenge familiar to many modern developers: a new service means juggling multiple configuration manifests—docker-compose.yml for local runs, Kubernetes YAML for production, and a .env file for secrets. A single missed line can cause frustrating errors that take hours or days to diagnose. And that’s just the simple case, without factoring in multiple environments, separate secret stores, or CI/CD pipelines. This duplication complicates every deployment, code review, and onboarding session.

Manifest Sprawl Hurts

  • Drift: Local and production configs diverge easily, such as when someone forgets to update a port or environment variable.
  • Onboarding toil: New developers often spend their first day getting containers wired up rather than writing code.
  • Review fatigue: Pull requests become bogged down by boilerplate YAML that few read thoroughly.
  • Hidden coupling: Important runtime dependencies are tracked externally—in wikis, or simply in the minds of senior engineers—instead of being version-controlled.
  • Under-modeled relationships: When relationships aren’t represented in a unified way, human knowledge becomes the integration glue, resulting in late-breakage issues during delivery cycles.

Aspire in a Nutshell

Aspire addresses these challenges by letting developers model the entire stack in a single C# graph. Every service, container, secret, and dependency is named explicitly:

var db = builder.AddPostgres("db");
var api = builder.AddProject<Api>("api").WithReference(db);

Note: The workloads can be any containerized application; C# is just employed as the modeling language for clarity and strongly-typed relationships.

Dev Loop: One Command to Run

aspire run
  • Boots up the full application stack on your local machine.
  • Automatically manages ports, secrets, and connection strings.
  • Launches a dashboard showing the live dependency graph, logs, and traces via OpenTelemetry built-in.

Shipping: One Command to Deploy

aspire publish
  • Outputs standard artifacts—plain Kubernetes YAML, Docker Compose files, or custom adapters that you’ve integrated.
  • Artifact generation is deterministic, making it ideal for CI/CD environments.
  • Wiring and observability remain consistent with the local run configuration.

Why Aspire Sticks

  • No more drift: Change a port once in your C# code, and both development and production environments update together.
  • Zero-setup onboarding: Just clone the repo and run aspire run to start coding.
  • Observability built-in: Logging and tracing (OpenTelemetry) are automatic, requiring no extra tooling or sidecars.
  • Pluggable architecture: Easily add components (e.g., aspire add redis) or write custom publishers for in-house services and target any platform (ECS, Nomad, etc.).
  • No lock-in: Generated artifacts are standard YAML and can be modified or discarded as needed.

If managing YAML files is working, you needn’t change. But if a cleaner, code-centric approach appeals, Aspire can collapse the sprawl and streamline your workflow.

Author: David Fowler — Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft

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