.NET 7 shipped on November 8th, and if you're running production workloads, the performance gains alone justify paying attention. We're talking 15-25% throughput improvements, but there's also new HTTP/3 support, better minimal APIs, and container improvements that make the whole package compelling.
Performance numbers
The .NET 7 team published benchmarks showing 15-25% throughput improvements on common web scenarios compared to .NET 6. The JIT improvements, loop optimisations, and reduced allocations in the BCL are the source. TechEmpower plaintext benchmark ranks show ASP.NET Core in the top 5 frameworks. For high-throughput APIs where compute cost matters, the upgrade from .NET 6 to .NET 7 has measurable ROI.
Minimal APIs stabilisation
.NET 6 introduced minimal APIs as a lightweight alternative to controller-based ASP.NET Core. .NET 7 fills in the gaps that made minimal APIs unsuitable for production: output caching, typed results for test assertions, API versioning support, and route groups for organising related endpoints. For new microservices where controller overhead is unnecessary, minimal APIs are now production-ready.
Container improvements
The .NET 7 SDK can publish directly to OCI container images without a Dockerfile using `dotnet publish /t:PublishContainer`. The base images have been rightsized: the default runtime image is now Debian 11 slim. The chiselled Ubuntu images (containing only the .NET runtime and its dependencies, nothing else) reduce container image size to 30-50% of the previous default. Smaller images mean faster pulls, smaller attack surface, and reduced storage costs.
HTTP/3 and QUIC
ASP.NET Core 7 includes HTTP/3 support via the QUIC transport. HTTP/3 uses UDP with QUIC's reliability and congestion control layer rather than TCP. The practical benefit is reduced latency in lossy network conditions (mobile, global edge) and elimination of TCP's head-of-line blocking. For APIs that serve mobile clients or operate at global scale, HTTP/3 support is a meaningful improvement.