My opinion is that we strive to reproduce on local the production ( yes, it works on my PC should not be replaced with yes, it works on production only )
So, I decided to challenge myself: Can I run every major Azure service on my local machine? Not just one or two, but pretty much everything – databases, storage, messaging, AI, the works.
Why? Because ,
- Learn Everything – I wanted to understand how all these services work together
- Work Offline – Airports, coffee shops with bad WiFi… you get it
- Fast Feedback – No network latency, instant responses
- Break Things Safely – Mess up? Just restart the container. No production incidents!
And what’s best for that, for a C# programmer, than Aspire ( 13.4 at this time) ?
The technology stack : Aspire, Docker, .NET 10 ( and , for AI, foundry.local)
The Nine Azure Services I Got Running
- Three different databases (SQL Server, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL)
- Blob storage for files
- Centralized configuration management
- Redis caching
- A local AI model
- Message queuing with Service Bus
- Event streaming with Event Hubs
For each one added in Aspire, I have added a C# project that read the connection string from environment variables ( this can be put also to the app.config file) and make a simple operation in order to verify all is running.
In the future posts I will detail each one. In the meantime you can see the source code at https://github.com/ignatandrei/aspireExtensions/tree/main/src/samples/13.4/AzureEmulators