Thank you
Thank you, open source
shoulders of giants
Aspire wouldn’t exist without the incredible open-source projects and communities that power the distributed apps ecosystem. This page is our thank-you to every contributor, maintainer, and community member behind the tools we depend on.
We 💜 open source
Observability & resilience
Section titled “Observability & resilience”The eyes, ears, and safety nets of distributed systems.
OpenTelemetryThe vendor-neutral observability standard that gives Aspire its distributed traces, metrics, and logs.
PollyThe resilience and transient-fault-handling library behind Aspire’s default retry and circuit-breaker policies.
Databases & storage
Section titled “Databases & storage”The data engines Aspire integrates with out of the box.
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
Redis
Valkey
Garnet
Milvus
Qdrant
SQLiteMessaging & eventing
Section titled “Messaging & eventing”The plumbing that keeps distributed services talking to each other.
RabbitMQ
NATS
Apache KafkaThe distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies.
Reverse proxy & networking
Section titled “Reverse proxy & networking”The traffic directors and protocol layers that connect services.
YARPYet Another Reverse Proxy — a highly customizable reverse proxy library built on .NET.
gRPCContainers & orchestration
Section titled “Containers & orchestration”The engines that package, ship, and run distributed workloads.
DockerThe platform that popularized containers and makes local development with Aspire seamless.
PodmanThe daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI containers.
KubernetesThe open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Email & developer services
Section titled “Email & developer services”Tools that simplify common dev-time workflows.
MailpitAn email and SMTP testing tool with a modern web UI, perfect for local development.
AI & machine learning
Section titled “AI & machine learning”The open-source projects powering Aspire’s AI integrations.
GitHub ModelsExplore and integrate AI models directly from GitHub — bringing model discovery to your workflow.
OpenAIThe AI platform behind GPT and DALL·E — powering intelligent features in Aspire apps.
OllamaRun large language models locally — the easiest way to bring AI into your Aspire apps.
Polyglot ecosystem
Section titled “Polyglot ecosystem”Aspire speaks many languages — thanks to these communities.
Node.jsThe JavaScript runtime that enables Aspire to orchestrate front-end and full-stack JS apps.
GoThe simple, efficient language for building reliable distributed services alongside Aspire.
PythonThe versatile language powering data science, AI, and web services in the Aspire ecosystem.
JavaThe enterprise workhorse that Aspire can orchestrate as part of polyglot architectures.
RustThe systems programming language bringing safety and speed to distributed apps.
DenoThe secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript with built-in tooling and web standards.
Bun
PowerShell
OrleansThe virtual actor framework for building distributed, high-scale applications in .NET.
.NET MAUIThe cross-platform framework for creating native mobile and desktop apps with .NET.
Testing frameworks
Section titled “Testing frameworks”The tools that help keep Aspire apps reliable.
xUnit.netThe community-focused unit testing tool for .NET — the backbone of Aspire’s test story.
NUnit
PlaywrightThe end-to-end testing framework for modern web apps — reliable cross-browser automation.
Localization
Section titled “Localization”The tools that help us speak every language.
LunariaThe localization management tool that tracks translation status for Astro and Starlight sites.
Web stack & documentation
Section titled “Web stack & documentation”The tools that power this very website.
Astro
StarlightThe beautiful documentation theme for Astro that makes aspire.dev shine.
Expressive CodeThe code block engine that makes our documentation examples beautiful and interactive.
MermaidThe JavaScript-based diagramming and charting tool that renders our architecture diagrams.
sharpThe high-performance image processing library that optimizes every image on this site.
pnpmUI & design
Section titled “UI & design”The design systems that make Aspire look and feel polished.
Fluent UIMicrosoft’s design system that powers the Aspire dashboard’s components and visual language.
Spectre.ConsoleThe beautiful console library that powers the Aspire CLI’s rich terminal experience.
Runtime & framework
Section titled “Runtime & framework”The bedrock of everything Aspire does — from the SDK and runtime to the Blazor-powered dashboard.
.NETThe free, open-source, cross-platform framework that is the foundation of Aspire.
C#The modern, type-safe language that makes Aspire’s app model expressive and powerful.
BlazorPowers the Aspire dashboard — a rich, interactive UI built entirely in .NET.
DaprDeveloper experience & CLI
Section titled “Developer experience & CLI”The tools that make the Aspire developer experience smooth.
hex1bThe CLI automation tool for terminal applications — used to test and validate Aspire’s CLI experiences.
asciinemaThe terminal session recorder that powers the animated CLI demos on aspire.dev.
And everyone else
Section titled “And everyone else”This page can’t capture every dependency, every pull request, or every community conversation that shaped Aspire into what it is today. To every contributor who filed an issue, opened a PR, answered a question on Discord, or shipped a NuGet package that Aspire depends on — thank you.