Arena

Build distributed systems, not distributed complexity.

Arena is an opinionated infrastructure framework for building modern .NET microservices. It provides a consistent programming model for service-to-service communication, messaging, resiliency, service integration, and application infrastructure so teams can focus on business logic instead of boilerplate.

Arena is designed around production-ready practices and embraces event-driven architecture, asynchronous messaging, and clean service boundaries.

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Why Arena?

Building microservices often means repeatedly solving the same infrastructure problems:

• Configuring MassTransit and RabbitMQ
• Creating resilient HTTP clients
• Handling retries and transient failures
• Standardizing request/response messaging
• Publishing integration events
• Managing service contracts
• Dependency injection configuration
• Distributed communication patterns
• Consistent conventions across services

Arena packages these concerns into reusable components so every service follows the same architecture.

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Features

Messaging

• Event publishing
• Event subscriptions
• Request/Response messaging
• Command messaging
• Automatic consumer registration
• Queue conventions
• Exchange conventions
• Message serialization
• Correlation support

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Service Infrastructure

• Convention-based configuration
• Dependency Injection extensions
• Service registration helpers
• Modular architecture
• Shared abstractions
• Common infrastructure components

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Developer Experience

• Minimal setup
• Clean APIs
• Opinionated defaults
• Extensible architecture
• XML documentation
• Source Link support

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Installation

dotnet add package Arena

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Architecture

Arena encourages an event-driven architecture where services remain autonomous while communicating through contracts.

                +----------------+
                |  Identity      |
                +----------------+
                      │
             UserCreated Event
                      │
      ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
      │               │               │
      ▼               ▼               ▼
+-------------+ +-------------+ +-------------+
| Notification| | Registration| |  Billing    |
+-------------+ +-------------+ +-------------+

Each service owns:

• Its own database
• Its own business logic
• Its own deployment lifecycle

Services communicate through messages instead of direct database access.

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Philosophy

Arena follows several design principles:

• Convention over configuration
• Event-first communication
• Loose coupling
• High cohesion
• Production-ready defaults
• Infrastructure should disappear into the background
• Business logic should remain independent of transport technologies

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Roadmap

• Messaging infrastructure
• Dependency injection extensions
• RabbitMQ integration
• MassTransit integration
• Distributed tracing
• Outbox support
• Inbox support

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Contributing

Contributions are welcome.

If you'd like to improve Arena:

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch
3. Commit your changes
4. Open a Pull Request

Please ensure all tests pass before submitting changes.

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License

Arena is released under the MIT License.

See the LICENSE file for details.

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Vision

Arena exists to make building distributed .NET applications simple, consistent, and maintainable.

Instead of every service solving the same infrastructure challenges differently, Arena provides a unified foundation so development teams can concentrate on delivering business value while relying on proven, production-ready infrastructure.