Dapr is a collection of APIs for building microservices that takes care of security, resiliency, and observability so that developers can focus on other aspects of building their applications.
Dapr provides building blocks that are based on best practices for building microservices, and those building blocks can then be incorporated into the application using whatever framework or language the developer prefers.
It runs as a sidecar process to the application, interacting with event triggers and communicating with the application. According to the maintainers, this allows it to support any programming language without the developer needing to import additional frameworks or libraries.
It provides capabilities like pub/sub messaging, state management, secrets management, service-to-service discovery, and more.
The project was born at Microsoft in 2019, reached its first stable release in February 2021, and has been a CNCF Incubating project since November 2021. As of August 2024, it has 23K stars on GitHub and over 250 contributors.
It integrates with several other CNCF projects as well, such as gRPC, SPIFFE, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and CloudEvents. It also runs natively on Kubernetes.
The most recent release, 1.14, was announced this week, adding new features like a new Jobs API that allows jobs to be scheduled for the future, streaming subscriptions, actors multi-tenancy, and improved HTTP metrics filtering.
“The v1.14 update provides many new capabilities for developers building distributed apps,” said Yaron Schneider, co-creator of Dapr and founder and chief technology officer at Diagrid. “Especially improving the scale and performance of Dapr workflows with the new scheduler service, as well as a new API for scheduling cron-like jobs, which has been a strong community request.”
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