Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) takes the pain out of building distributed applications by offering developers simple “building block” APIs to manage the challenges of connecting with complex infrastructure. Developers can use these APIs to interact with other systems or components such as service-to-service invocation, state management and secrets. They can additionally leverage observability for their apps—all without getting bogged down in implementation details.
For example, say a developer needs to store state. They simply call Dapr’s “State Management” building block API, and that’s it. Done. State is stored, and they move on with their lives. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the platform team picks the actual state-store technology—PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, whatever. Then BAM! The platform team can implement best practices without burdening the developer with the details! And if the platform team wants to swap out the backend later? No biggie—the developer’s code stays the same.
And that’s just one API. Dapr has a bunch of these building blocks—check them out here.
How does it work? Dapr exposes its building block APIs using a sidecar architecture. That way, the app code doesn’t need to include any infrastructure-specific dependencies. This provides three benefits: first, sidecars make it easy to integrate Dapr into applications. Second, sidecars separate the application logic from the implementation logic, and finally, sidecars scale automatically alongside your application.
The cherry on top is that Dapr offers SDKs to make integration even easier, but you can also call its APIs directly via HTTP or gRPC. Supported languages include Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET, PHP, and Python.
If you have questions, don’t ask me! I simply spent some time deciphering the documentation. Instead, I recommend you check out the Dapr website and/or ask your questions to the Dapr community on Discord.
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Whitney will be speaking at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, 1-4 April in London! Attend her interactive talk Choose Your Own Adventure: The Dignified Pursuit of a Developer Platform, or check out the fun panel discussion she’s participating in on Platform Engineering Day. ♫
