This blog shows how Aspire orchestrates a complete modern stack – services, local LLM and all – within five minutes of your git clone.
Full-stack development in 2026 is so much more than just a database, a backend and a frontend.
Why full-stack development in 2026 is more than a database, backend and frontend.
Across all the projects and environments I’ve seen, there was one moment that always came back: onboarding a new colleague onto a repo.
Sometimes you were lucky and pulling in the code was enough. Add a connection string to a shared dev database, and you could start tackling bugs right away. But far more often, you’d find yourself sitting next to a seasoned senior, fiddling with three obscure scripts. You had to set a handful of secrets manually in your environment variables, undergo a ritual initiation complete with blood sacrifice, and copy an appsettings.json full of API keys that had just been sent over via Teams. Only then could you start introducing bugs – or fixing them.
Only to do the exact same dance at the next onboarding. Another two person-days, and a goat, gone from your budget.
The shift from YAML to code
That’s what intrigued me when I first heard about Aspire. The project was co-created by David Fowler (the same person behind NuGet, SignalR and ASP.NET Core) as the spiritual successor to Project Tye. It was positioned with an ambitious marketing line:
“.NET Aspire is an opinionated stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET.”
What started as an experiment grew, driven by developer feedback, into the way to run a distributed application locally. Think docker-compose, but in C# instead of YAML, and with your service configuration right next to your code instead of in a separate file. Service discovery, OpenTelemetry, health checks, resource orchestration: terms you used to have to wire together yourself now come as standard.
More than just .NET
By now, the “.NET” has disappeared from the name, and that’s not just a marketing decision. In the beginning, Aspire mostly revolved around .NET projects, alongside locally spun-up cloud services such as Redis, SQL databases, an Event Grid emulator or RabbitMQ.
Recently, you can also include Python and Node.js applications as first-class resources. You can even write your AppHost (the heart of your orchestration) in Python or JavaScript instead of C#. What started as a .NET tool has become an orchestrator for modern stacks that stopped revolving around a single language a long time ago.
And that’s exactly the core of this talk: full-stack development in 2026 is no longer about a database, a backend and a frontend. A modern app needs a queue, a vector store, a local LLM and three language runtimes – and they all have to run together before you write your first line of production code.
Tooling and local AI with Ollama
By 2026, Aspire has grown into a serious orchestrator with real tooling. Alongside the integrations maintained by the Aspire team itself (Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Azure resources), there’s the Aspire Community Toolkit: a collection of integrations built by the community, and since this year officially a .NET Foundation project.
On top of that, there’s a fully-fledged aspire CLI and a built-in MCP integration, allowing your AI coding agent (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor) to work directly with your running application: querying resources, reading logs and traces, no copy-paste work required.
The list is long: SurrealDB, Meilisearch, ActiveMQ, Java and Go hosting, and (one of the most fascinating ones for this talk) a smooth Ollama integration via OllamaSharp. With a few lines of code, you spin up an Ollama container locally, download a model like llama3.2, and inject an IChatClient into your .NET or Python application. Local, free, and without any hassle with rate limits or API costs during development.
How do you spin up a complete application – services and local LLM included, ritual blood sacrifice excluded – within five minutes of your git clone? That’s what I’ll walk you through in this blog.
Want to know more?
Curious how Aspire could simplify your development workflow? Reach out to us, we are happy to share our experience.
