UPDATE! Aspire Roadmap '25 - 9.5 has shipped!

[maddymontaquila]

Hi everyone!

Thank you so much for your engagement and feedback on the Roadmap we posted a few months. We wanted to share an update on what’s landed, what’s actively in flight, and where we haven’t yet made progress. The content below is based on the original discussion, but reorganized (and in some cases split out further) to reflect the current state of things.

We’ve made great strides across the board, especially with new dashboard features and tooling improvements, which are now much more robust and developer-friendly. On the deployment side, we’ve got a lot of exciting work underway. The only thing we haven’t yet been able to turn our attention to is testing, but we're hoping to get work underway there soon.

Looking forward, we're going to drive as many of these "In Progress" or "Preview" items to completion as possible. We're also spending some extra effort on the Aspire + Python experience in the next month. So, as always, we’d love your thoughts and feedback - and don't forget to come hang out with us on Discord!

@davidfowl , @maddymontaquila , and the Aspire team 💫

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🧑‍💻 Local Developer Experience

🚢 Shipped in 9.5

• Dev Tunnels (In Preview) – First-class support for exposing your local environment to external systems or teammates.

🔨 In Progress

• Execute Commands in Containers (In Preview/In Progress) – Run shell commands or scripts inside your containerized services with one command.
• Built-in Runtime Acquisition – Automatically installs the runtime required to bootstrap various dependencies (node, python, .NET, java etc)
• Local HTTPS Everywhere – Consistent TLS support across Aspire resources, containers, and external services.

⏳ Not yet started

• .localhost DNS Support – Each resource gets a predictable, friendly name like redis.localhost or api.localhost.
• Run Subsets of the App – Start only the services you need for faster feedback loops.
• Debug .NET Projects Inside Containers – Run a .NET project in a container with support for interactive debugging from your IDE.
• Multi-Repo Support – Native tooling for coordinating Aspire apps spread across multiple repositories, no custom glue required.

🧪 Testing Experience

⏳ Not yet started

• Live Dashboard During Test Runs – Visualize service behavior in real time while tests are executing.
• Capture & Replay from CI – Record dashboard state during CI runs and replay locally to debug failures.
• Partial AppHost Execution – Run only the services required for the test to reduce startup time and noise.
• Request Redirection & Mocking – Redirect traffic to and from specific resources using in-process mocks.
• Code Coverage Support – Collect and report coverage as part of the test pipeline.

📊 Dashboard

🚢 Shipped in 9.5

• Cross-Linking Between Traces, Logs, and Metrics – Seamlessly navigate between traces, relevant log lines, and metric spikes to simplify diagnostics.
• Path Base & Reverse Proxy Support – Support for hosting the dashboard behind load balancers or reverse proxies with configurable base paths.
• Deploy Anywhere – First-class support for running the dashboard outside Azure environments, including Docker, Kubernetes, and custom hosting setups.
• • Conversational View – Improved rendering for LLM interactions with structured input/output formatting and chat context.
• Token Usage Visualization – Real-time cards showing token counts, latency, and evaluation metadata for each AI call.
• LLM-Specific Metrics – Native support for Gen AI telemetry such as model name, temperature, stop sequences, and function call traces.

🔨 In Progress

• • Improved Search & Filtering (In preview/In progress) – Enhanced UI for finding specific resources, logs, traces, or events across large applications.

⏳ Not yet started

• Storage Support – Persist dashboard state and telemetry externally to survive restarts and crashes. Designed for development and test workflows—not for long-term retention or large-scale observability.
• Custom Layouts & Grouping – Organize and group resources in the graph for improved readability and team-aligned structure.

🛠 Tooling

🚢 Shipped in 9.5

• Single-File AppHost (Preview) – Minimal executable for running Aspire apps without scaffolding.
• VS Code Extension (Preview) – Run, debug, and orchestrate Aspire apps across .NET, JavaScript (edit: JS not started yet!), and Python.
• • Aspire CLI – update and run

🔨 In Progress

• Aspire CLI – init (adding Aspire to an app)

⏳ Not yet started

• Homebrew & Winget Installers – Standard install support for macOS and Windows.

🌐 Polyglot Support

🔨 In Progress

• Templates & Samples – Full quickstarts and documentation for C#, Python, and JavaScript.
• Cross-Language AppHost (Experimental) – Exploring WASM + WIT to support multiple runtimes in a single process.

⏳ Not yet started

• Consistent Client Integrations – Typed connection strings, config wiring, and telemetry work uniformly across all languages (pip and npm packages to start)

🤖 AI Workflows

🚢 Shipped in 9.5

• Azure AI Foundry Agent Support (Preview) – Native support for building agent-based apps with Azure Foundry.
• OpenAI Integration (Preview) – Configure OpenAI models directly from your app host.

🔨 In Progress

• Aspire MCP Server – Optional runtime endpoint exposing the app model for agents and tools.

☁ Hosting Integrations

🚢 Shipped in 9.5

• Azure Redis Enterprise
• • Kusto (ADX)

⏳ Not yet started

• VNet Modeling – Define and enforce subnet boundaries across services.
• Event Grid
• Azure Front Door
• Azure API Management (APIM)
• Auth Providers – Support for Entra ID, Keycloak, and Easy Auth (ACA, App Service).

🚀 Deployment

🔨 In Progress

Environment Support

• Define environments (dev, stage, prod, etc.) with environment-scoped config, secrets, and outputs.

🎯 Deployment Target Status

The goal is to provide GA-level support for all of these targets, with consistent configuration, secrets, environment modeling, and deployment workflows.

Target	Status
Azure Container Apps (ACA)	✅ Most Complete
Docker Compose	⚠️ In Progress
Kubernetes	⚠️ In Progress
Azure App Service	⚠️ In Progress
Azure Functions on ACA	⚠️ In Progress
ACA Jobs	✅ Shipped in 9.5
AKS	🛠 Planned
Azure Functions (App Service)	🛠 Planned

✅ = Most complete deployment experience today
⚠️ = Available with limitations
🛠 = Not yet implemented

⏳ Not yet started

• Generate pipelines for:

  • GitHub Actions
  • Azure DevOps
  • GitLab

• Pipelines include environment-awareness and secret handling scaffolding.

📚 Content & Community

aspire.dev is finalizing design and deployment - and we have already started streaming exclusively to our YouTube and Twitch channels! Stay tuned for more news about an Aspire-specific event 👀

[KennethHoff]

The aspire.dev link goes to https://github.com/dotnet/aspire/discussions/aspire.dev btw, which I imagine is wrong

[maddymontaquila]

site isnt live yet so its just a dummy redirect but i will fix it to just not be a link LOL

[tjwald]

The docker image building should be it's own publisher IMO.

[davidfowl]

That's an implementation detail, you mean you want to be able to publish container images to a registry separately from other steps. We'll enable that but it won't take the shape of a "publisher".

[tjwald]

Sounds good to me!
BTW - we publish to multiple registries in the same environment, so that should also be supported 🙏