In 2019, Microsoft unveiled Dapr, an open-source runtime for distributed applications. With thousands of contributors and tens of thousands of organizations as users, it has been a resounding success.
Dapr (short for Distributed Application Runtime) has been graduated as a CNCF project since late October, meaning it is ready for large-scale use. However, as an “incubated” project from 2021 to the present, it has already been adopted by companies such as Grafana and HDFC Bank. 21 maintainers are key the project, which has also been able to count on more than 3,700 contributors. But what exactly does it do?
A runtime for everywhere
“Dapr has a single mission: to meet the emerging needs of developers and solve the most complex problems in distributed computing,” Dapr maintainer Yaron Schneider says. His colleague Mark Fussell adds that Dapr’s API approach is democratizing. It has enabled “any developer to tackle the complexities of building microservice architectures and deliver business value,” Fussell says.
Regardless of its Microsoft origins, Dapr is lauded for its vendor-neutral nature, something natural for an open source project. For this kind of cloud native tool, this is also essential, as Dapr’s strength lies precisely in its broad applicability.
Dapr also makes grateful use of similar open-source cloud native projects. Think of OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, SPIFFE, gRPC and Cloud Events. CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk therefore describes it as a “comprehensive” solution for building edge and cloud native applications.
Growing pains
So Dapr is widely used and, as you might expect, the CNCF announcement focuses on the positives. Is there also a critical note? Based on feedback from online users, it is understood that the setup of the tool causes headaches at times, but the simplification of the app rollout on a variety of platforms seems to be worth the effort.
That rollout consists of several components. One is the Service Invocation API to easily link different services via a sidecar, or extra functionality that runs alongside a Kubernetes container. It ensures that developers do not have to directly link each service together. In addition, Dapr simplifies things like secret management and state management, obviously along with various open-source projects that regularly also have a CNCF origin.
Dapr’s roadmap includes both stability and innovation. For example, a stable workflow API is coming from version 1.15 the next month and this version launches conversational AI in alpha form right away.
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