Building a .NET Core Technical Middle Platform on Kubernetes

Why a Middle Platform?

The Chinese Internet has evolved through three eras: the early web era, the e‑commerce/transaction era, and the current enterprise‑service era (2018‑2020). In this third era, applications must extend beyond single departments to serve the whole company and external partners, requiring a unified, reusable business layer—hence the need for a middle platform.

A business middle platform centralizes shared services so that all downstream applications can obtain data and functionality from a single source, improving consistency and speed of delivery.

Building a Technical Middle Platform on Kubernetes

When creating a startup’s IT systems, the choice is between traditional VM‑based setups and a modern cloud‑native approach. The speaker advocates using Kubernetes (K8s) as the foundation because it provides:

Declarative, immutable infrastructure that eliminates environment drift between development, testing, and production.

Automatic scaling, rolling updates, and self‑healing capabilities.

A unified platform for both containerized workloads and serverless functions.

In practice, the speaker uses Tencent Cloud’s TKE (a managed K8s service) to avoid the operational overhead of building a cluster from scratch. TKE offers cluster scheduling, Helm‑based application packaging, Docker image management, and Istio service mesh features.

Key considerations when deciding between self‑managed K8s and a managed service include team size, operational expertise, and the need for rapid experimentation. For a four‑person startup, a managed service like TKE is often the most practical choice.

Why Choose .NET Core?

.NET Core is a cross‑platform, open‑source framework backed by the .NET Foundation. Its ecosystem has grown rapidly, with many open‑source projects, high PR activity, and strong community support, making it suitable for building microservices on Kubernetes.

Performance benchmarks show .NET Core can be more than twice as fast as Java for many workloads, and recent releases (e.g., .NET Core 2.2 → 3.0) have delivered significant throughput gains and memory reductions.

Using .NET Core together with K8s enables developers to write portable code that runs on any cloud provider, while leveraging container orchestration for continuous delivery, gray‑release, and elastic scaling.

Practical Architecture Overview

The technical middle platform consists of three layers:

Business services – core domain logic exposed via APIs.

Common services – shared utilities such as authentication, logging, and configuration.

PaaS runtime – the Kubernetes cluster, service mesh, and CI/CD pipelines that host the microservices.

Additionally, a custom API gateway (contributed to an open‑source project) is deployed alongside the platform to handle routing and security.

Images illustrating the architecture, Kubernetes growth trends, and .NET Core’s open‑source roadmap are included in the original presentation.