I Replaced Docker Compose with .NET Aspire. Here’s What Happened

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In this video, I’ll show you how to integrate .NET Aspire into an existing Clean Architecture application—no need to start from scratch.

We’ll start with a .NET 9 solution that uses Docker Compose for Postgres, Redis, and Seq. Then, step-by-step, I’ll migrate everything to use .NET Aspire’s orchestrator and integrations.

You’ll learn how to:

Scaffold Aspire’s AppHost and ServiceDefaults projects
Fix issues with Central Package Management and keep Aspire packages up to date
Add Aspire integrations for Postgres, Redis, and RabbitMQ
Use WithReference to inject connection strings and set up health checks
Configure service discovery between projects
Replace Serilog with OpenTelemetry for structured logs
Visualize services, dependencies, metrics, and distributed traces in the Aspire dashboard

By the end, you’ll have a full local dev environment with observability, service orchestration, and zero manual configuration.

🔗 Source code is linked in the pinned comment.

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Chapters
0:00 Adding .NET Aspire
1:15 Fixing CPM problems
2:00 Latest Aspire version
2:50 Aspire AppHost
3:33 Aspire ServiceDefaults
5:33 Adding external services
9:10 Using the Aspire dashboard