Dapr has evolved considerably since we last featured it in the Radar. Its many new features include job scheduling, virtual actors as well as more sophisticated retry policies and observability components. Its list of building blocks continues to grow with jobs, cryptography and more. Our teams also note its increasing focus on secure defaults, with support for mTLS and distroless images. All in all, we've been happy with Dapr and are looking forward to future developments.
Dapr, short for Distributed Application Runtime, helps developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices that run in the cloud. Some people may confuse it with a service mesh, because it uses a sidecar architecture that runs as a separate process alongside the application. Dapr is more application oriented and focuses on encapsulating the fault tolerance and connectivity required for building distributed applications. For example, Dapr provides multiple building blocks, from service invocation and message pub/sub to distributed lock, all of which are common patterns in distributed communication. One of our teams evaluated Dapr on a recent project; given their positive experience, they’re looking forward to bringing it to other projects in the future.
