DEVOPSdigest

As organizations seek scalable, cloud native architectures, Dapr's developer productivity benefits and growing role in AI applications have driven widespread adoption. Nearly half of surveyed teams are now running Dapr applications in production, marking a significant increase from previous years, according to 2025 State of Dapr Report from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®).

Dapr (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.

The report found that 96% of developers report time savings, with 60% seeing productivity gains of 30% or more when using Dapr. The runtime's ability to simplify microservices complexity, enable cloud portability, and support multiple programming languages has made it an essential tool for platform engineering teams and application developers alike.

96% of developers report time savings, with 60% seeing productivity gains of 30% or more when using Dapr.

"Dapr's impact on modern application development continues to grow, helping teams build and scale distributed systems with ease," said Mark Fussell, co-creator of Dapr and CEO of Diagrid. "With the rise of AI-driven applications and increasing cloud complexity, Dapr provides developers with a flexible and efficient foundation to innovate without the burden of infrastructure concerns. This means faster development cycles, reduced costs, and the ability to seamlessly deploy applications across multiple environments; ultimately giving organizations a competitive edge."

Organizations adopting Dapr have reportedly gained a competitive edge in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies, as demonstrated by the surge in AWS usage from 22% to 38%. This flexibility allows enterprises to avoid vendor lock-in and optimize costs while maintaining portability across cloud providers.

Dapr's expansion into the AI ecosystem is another key trend, with the introduction of the LLM Conversation API and Dapr Agents, positioning the framework as a natural fit for AI-driven and agentic applications.

Despite its rapid growth, the Dapr community continues to push for improvements, with users citing observability, debugging, and workflow visualization as areas for enhancement. To address onboarding challenges, the launch of Dapr University aims to provide developers with structured learning resources to accelerate adoption.

"Dapr's continued adoption demonstrates its role in the cloud native ecosystem, simplifying developer experience," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. "By providing developers with a standardized way to build and operate distributed applications, Dapr is reducing complexity, improving efficiency, and enabling organizations to scale with confidence."

Originally launched in 2019, Dapr was accepted into CNCF in 2021 and reached Graduated status in 2024, joining Istio, Kubernetes, and Prometheus among the foundation's top-tier projects. Today, over 40,000 companies engage with Dapr, reinforcing its impact across industries, including finance, healthcare, retail, and SaaS.