I first found .NET in 2003 when I first began learning to create software. Every year since then, I've watched as .NET matured into something great, and now we have .NET Core! At Contessa Health, we use .NET Core for a mixture of things including fine-grained and coarse-grained web services, worker processes for long running tasks, and for our Azure Functions that serve as a replacement for distributing our base class libraries. As a startup, we are constantly evaluating technologies to make sure we stay fresh, and we keep coming back to .NET Core because of its ecosystem, maturity of the tooling, and for its ability to help us iterate and move quickly. Take all of that and combine it with the Kubernetes ecosystem, and we have an easy way to orchestrate and compose power service offerings that meet the needs of our customers. It cannot be said enough that Microsoft’s commitment to open source has yielded incredible benefits for small companies such as ourselves. Our voices are heard, and we get to help make .NET Core better, which in turn helps everyone else.

I've used .NET for many years, but only in recent years, after Microsoft introduced .NET Core, I've found a new love and excitement for the technology again. The main driver for us using .NET Core is not that it is cross platform compatible, open source or blazingly fast (which it is!), but the fact that we can use (what we consider) the best programming languages (mainly F# and C#) to carry out our jobs without sacrificing the other benefits.

Today we run most of our web infrastructure on .NET Core in Docker containers, deployed into a Kubernetes cluster which spans across multiple time zones in the Google Cloud and we couldn't be happier. Due to the portability of the .NET Core platform we are even able to develop many new services as serverless functions with F# which has become an absolute game changer.

Our focus is on mobile. I use .NET because most of my work involves Xamarin. We haven't had a need for .NET Core lately since Xamarin covers the iOS, Android bases. .NET Core seems best suited to larger organizations who need to port and migrate between Windows, Linux, and macOS. Seems incredibly useful, particularly the Windows/Linux crossover. But for us, Mono takes care of that already in Xamarin.