DEVOPSdigest

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of Dapr.

Dapr, or Distributed Application Runtime, is a portable runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient distributed applications that run across cloud and edge. It provides integrated APIs for communication, state, and workflow for building production-ready applications. It leverages industry best practices for security, resiliency, and observability, increasing developer productivity by between 20 and 40 percent.

"Dapr has a single mission: to meet the emerging needs of developers and solve the most complex problems in distributed computing," said Yaron Schneider, Dapr maintainer and Steering Committee member and CTO, co-founder of Diagrid. "The project has done very well in helping application developers navigate the complexities of cloud native architectures, and the engagement with the CNCF community proved to be an amazing catalyst for the project's growth and maturity"

The project was first released in 2019 at Microsoft and was accepted into the CNCF Incubator in November 2021. Since then, Dapr has grown to over 3,700 individual contributors from more than 400 organizations. It is used by tens of thousands of organizations, including Grafana, FICO, HDFC Bank, SharperImage, Zeiss and more. Today, it is maintained by 21 individuals affiliated with eight organizations who have released regular versions every quarter with many new developer APIs, including workflows, secrets, cryptography, configuration management, and LLMs. Together, the Dapr SDKs have over 70 million downloads, with 50 million image pulls.

"Dapr's API approach coupled with its ability to rapidly swap underlying infrastructure, whether that is storage, message brokers or secret stores, has enabled any developer to tackle the complexities of building microservice architectures and deliver business value," said Mark Fussell, Dapr maintainer and Steering Committee member, CEO and co-founder of Diagrid. "CNCF has been perfect for Dapr to grow a strong community with other cloud native technologies in a vendor-neutral environment."

"In an era where traffic is king, Dapr has redefined distributed application development by helping developers focus on business logic, and significantly enhancing development efficiency," said Loong Dai, Dapr maintainer and Steering Committee member, cloud engineer at Intel. "As a core maintainer, I'm proud to see many FaaS frameworks and products leveraging Dapr as their runtime."

Dapr integrates with many projects in the cloud native ecosystem, including OpenTelemetry to generate and export telemetry data, Prometheus to collect and analyze runtime metrics, SPIFFE for identifying and securing services, gRPC and Cloud Events for sending communications between application services. The Dapr control plane, which, among other capabilities, deploys Dapr sidecars for each application, is hosted on Kubernetes and is deployed with Helm charts.

"In today's competitive environment, it is more important than ever for organizations to be able to ship reliable and scalable applications quickly," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. "Dapr provides a comprehensive solution for developing edge and cloud native applications, saving developers valuable time and freeing them to focus on innovating."

"We see Dapr leveling the playing field for developers of all skill ranges who can build distributed apps and cloud backends with best practices like mTLS, app security policy, resiliency, and thread safety that are built-in. For more sophisticated workloads we are seeing the reliable chaining and orchestration of AI pipelines & multiple models using Workflow." said Paul Yuknewicz, Dapr steering committee member, and Group Product Manager for Azure Serverless at Microsoft.

Next, Dapr maintainers will focus on the project roadmap, which includes the upcoming v1.15 release next month. This release will bring a stable workflow API and an alpha AI conversational API, which can be used with different LLMs such as AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral AI, Hugging Face, and more. Beyond the next release, Dapr will support different storage APIs, including blob and document with swappable infrastructure. The Dapr project's goal is to continue innovating and providing common software patterns to developers building distributed applications.