What is DAPR?
DAPR stands for distributed application runtime. It is an open source project started by Microsoft. As of November 2021 it is officially endorsed by the CNCF as an incubator project
https://www.cncf.io/blog/2021/11/03/dapr-distributed-application-runtime-joins-cncf-incubator/
What can you use it for?
DAPR is essentially a set of APIs, built on a concept of building blocks for developers to build modern distributed applications and microservices on Cloud platforms, on premise either in a self hosted mode or via containers running on Kubernetes. This makes it a highly portable runtime.
Dapr architecture
Dapr is language agnostic as it provides the developer with the essential tools and building blocks for building a cloud native distributed application. This helps with the common concerns such as:
- State management
- Pub/sub
- Secrets management
- Service discovery
Sidecars
Dapr is built on a concept of sidecar. A Sidecar is a common pattern used in modern distributed applications to support the main application by dealing with common cross cutting concerns such as security and logging. Dapr works on this model by providing a consistent API in a building block hosted in a sidecar.
Hosting
Dapr provides you multiple options. Due to its architecture it it is extremely portable. You can host it using the follows methods:
- Kubernetes
- Self hosted
- Serverless. Azure container apps is one current example https://docs.dapr.io/operations/hosting/serverless/azure-container-apps/
Summary
To summarise, building modern distributed systems can be hard for developers as there are many moving parts in solutions that use Microservice style (Service location, Service mesh, distributed logging). A lot of companies employ platform teams to maintain and support such systems that support the plumbing and configuration.
With Dapr the developer can concentrate on the main areas of work which are building APIs, systems that build on business logic. By following key architectural principles of loose coupling through REST APIs.
Dapr provides an opportunity for teams to build their next product on a development runtime that aids the developer.
In the next part we will look at getting started with Dapr.
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