Developing on AWS with C#

Chapter 3. Migrating a Legacy .NET Framework Application to AWS

In the previous chapters, we have seen some of the exciting tools and services that AWS gives us as developers. We are next going to take a look at what we can do with some of our legacy .NET applications and explore what is made possible by moving them to the cloud.

Software development is not, as we’re sure you are uncomfortably aware, a pursuit solely of greenfield projects, clean repos, tidy backlogs, and the latest toolsets. Organizations of all sizes can have legacy code, some of which may still be running on premises, internal tools, APIs, workflows, and applications that are actively used but not actively maintained. Migrating these to the cloud can provide your organization with cost savings, increased performance, and a drastically improved ability to scale.

In this chapter, you will learn how to choose, plan, and execute the migration of a web application running on IIS and built on either .NET Framework or .NET Core/6+.

Note

With the release of .NET 5 in November 2020, Microsoft has renamed .NET Core to simply “.NET”. In these next chapters, we will refer to .NET Core and all future versions as .NET and the previous, legacy version of the framework as .NET Framework.

Choosing a Migration Path

Every .NET application will have a different path to the cloud and, while we cannot create a one-size-fits-all framework for migrating a legacy .NET application, we can learn from the migrations of those that came ...