Particular Platform with Amazon SQS in Aspire

Aspire is a stack for developing distributed applications provided by Microsoft.

This sample shows an Aspire AppHost project that orchestrates multiple NServiceBus endpoints, wiring up the required infrastructure pieces when using the Amazon SQS transport.

This sample does not include any AWS resource deployments as it is not required to demonstrate the Particular Platform running within aspire. When this sample is run the Platform and Endpoints will generate the required queues and topics in SQS. Refer to the Integrating AWS with .NET Aspire in the AWS SDK for .NET documentation page for more information on AWS resources within Aspire.

If you're missing certain capabilities to use Aspire with NServiceBus, share them and help shape the future of the platform.

Running the sample

1. Run the AspireDemo.AppHost project
2. Open the Aspire dashboard
3. Review the metrics, traces, and structured log entries of each of the resources

Code walkthrough

AspireDemo.AppHost

The Aspire orchestration project defines multiple resources and the relationships between them:

• Parameters to configure the sample
  • accessKey - configurable after startup
  • accessSecret - configurable after startup
• Two projects, each of which is an NServiceBus endpoint. All of these projects reference the platform resource.
  • clientui
  • sales
• ServiceControl error, audit and monitoring instances
• ServicePulse

Platform configuration

• region
• resourceNamePrefix - change this to avoid resource conflicts in your region
• accessKey - configurable after startup
• accessSecret - configurable after startup

AddParticularPlatform registers the Particular Platform as a resource named particular. The WithTransportAmazonSqs extension points the platform at the SQS configuration defined earlier, so that the ServiceControl instances connect to the same AWS region as the endpoints.

The .WithDefaultComponents registers the remaining platform components using their default configuration — the ServiceControl error, audit and monitoring instances, ServicePulse and RavenDB for the ServiceControl database.

var region = Amazon.RegionEndpoint.USWest1;

//optional: prefix to avoid conflicts with existing queues in the AWS account.
var resourceNamePrefix = "particular-aspire-demo-";

var accessKey = builder.AddParameter("accessKey");
var accessSecret = builder.AddParameter("secretKey", secret:true);

var platform = builder
    .AddParticularPlatform("particular")
    .WithTransportAmazonSqs(
        region.SystemName,
        accessKey.Resource,
        accessSecret.Resource,
        conf =>
        {
            conf.QueueNamePrefix = resourceNamePrefix;
            conf.TopicNamePrefix = resourceNamePrefix;
        }
    )
    .AddDefaultComponents();

Endpoints

Each NServiceBus endpoint is added as an Aspire project and linked to the platform with WithParticularPlatform. The ClientUI endpoint additionally uses WaitFor(sales) so that the Sales endpoint exists before it starts sending messages to it.

The Aspire hosting component will automatically pass the transport authentication settings to the endpoints as environment variables, so that the NServiceBus endpoint's transport can authenticate with AWS without additional configuration.

The resourceNamePrefix is also passed as RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX, so that the endpoints can use it when configuring the transport and when sending messages to ensure they are using the correct queues.

var sales = builder.AddProject<Projects.Sales>("Sales")
    .WaitFor(platform)
    .WithEnvironment("RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX", resourceNamePrefix)
    .WithParticularPlatform(platform);

builder.AddProject<Projects.ClientUI>("ClientUI")
    .WaitFor(sales)
    .WithEnvironment("RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX", resourceNamePrefix)
    .WithParticularPlatform(platform);

AspireDemo.ServiceDefaults

The Aspire service defaults project provides extension methods to configure application hosts and NServiceBus endpoints in a standardized way. This project is referenced by all of the NServiceBus endpoint projects.

The OpenTelemetry configuration has been updated to include NServiceBus metrics and traces.

builder.Services.AddOpenTelemetry()
    .WithMetrics(metrics =>
    {
        metrics.AddMeter("NServiceBus.*")
            .AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation()
            .AddHttpClientInstrumentation()
            .AddRuntimeInstrumentation();
    })
    .WithTracing(tracing =>
    {
        tracing.AddSource(builder.Environment.ApplicationName)
            .AddSource("NServiceBus.*")
            .AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation(tracing =>
                // Exclude health check requests from tracing
                tracing.Filter = context =>
                    !context.Request.Path.StartsWithSegments(HealthEndpointPath)
                    && !context.Request.Path.StartsWithSegments(AlivenessEndpointPath)
            )
            // Uncomment the following line to enable gRPC instrumentation
            //  (requires the OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.GrpcNetClient package)
            //.AddGrpcClientInstrumentation()
            .AddHttpClientInstrumentation();
    });

Each endpoint project creates an Amazon SQS transport and sets the queue prefix to match the AppHost configuation, and configures NServiceBus to use it as a transport relying on the AWS_* environment variables added by WithParticularPlatform to authenticate with AWS:

var resourceNamePrefix = builder.Configuration["RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX"] ?? "";

var routing = endpointConfiguration.UseTransport(new SqsTransport()
{
    QueueNamePrefix = resourceNamePrefix,
    TopicNamePrefix = resourceNamePrefix,
});

var resourceNamePrefix = builder.Configuration["RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX"] ?? "";

var routing = endpointConfiguration.UseTransport(new SqsTransport()
{
    QueueNamePrefix = resourceNamePrefix,
    TopicNamePrefix = resourceNamePrefix,
});

Finally, each endpoint enables NServiceBus installers. Every time the application host is run, the transport and ServiceControl database are recreated and will not contain the queues and tables needed for the endpoints to run. Enabling installers allows NServiceBus to set up the assets that it needs at runtime.

endpointConfiguration.EnableInstallers();

endpointConfiguration.EnableInstallers();

Endpoint projects

Each of the endpoint projects contain the same code to create an application host, apply the configuration from the ServiceDefaults project on the NServiceBus endpoint.

var builder = Host.CreateApplicationBuilder(args);

builder
    .AddServiceDefaults()
    .AddNServiceBusEndpoint("Sales");

await builder.Build().RunAsync();

To demonstrate the platform's error handling, the Sales endpoint's handler throws an exception for a random subset of the messages it receives:

if (Random.Shared.Next(0, 5) == 0)
{
    throw new Exception("Oops");
}

Failed messages are moved to the error queue, where they can be inspected and retried from ServicePulse.