The Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) team announced today that Dapr v1.0 is now available and is considered production-ready.
Dapr is an open-source, portable, event-driven runtime that allows developers to build resilient, microservices-based, stateless, and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge. It aims to enable developers to focus on writing business logic instead of solving distributed system challenges, thereby significantly improving their productivity and reducing development time. With the v1.0 release, developers can deploy Dapr applications to self-hosted infrastructure or Kubernetes clusters in production scenarios.
Dapr hides the complexity of distributed systems by implementing the Sidecar pattern. With this pattern, Dapr loads a sidecar next to every microservice in the application. In turn, this sidecar exposes standard functionality over REST and gRPC protocols that can be consumed either directly from the application code or via SDKs. SDKs for Java, .NET, Python, and Go are also released with v1.0 as production-ready, with additional SDKs for JavaScript/Node.js, C++, Rust, and PHP currently in preview.
Source: https://blog.dapr.io/posts/2021/02/17/announcing-dapr-v1.0/
Dapr provides developers with services such as service-to-service invocation with mutual authentication and encryption, extensive access-control lists (ACL) support, and secured identity with spiffe, along with state management, pub/sub, an actor framework, secret management, and observability. It provides these services with over 70+ components developed by the community. These components integrate with Azure, AWS, Alibaba, and Google clouds and popular platforms such as RabbitMQ. Only a subset of these components is GA approved for v1.0 release, with others joining them as they become more widely used and tested.
A significant topic that critiques raise in regards to Dapr and the Sidecar pattern, in general, is performance. The Dapr team specifically addressed this concern:
Performance is critical in cloud-native applications, and Dapr puts a premium on high performance. A topic that often gets raised is the implications of having a sidecar model doing all the heavy lifting for your application and the trade-off with data plane performance. One area of particular focus is with the Service Invocation building block, and here, when calling between two applications through two Dapr sidecars and receiving a response back, Dapr adds less than 2ms latency at the 99th percentile in the request/response. This shows that Dapr has extremely low service-to-service latency and has been optimized for high throughput scenarios.
Microsoft introduced Dapr in October 2019, and it has had 14 releases since. In September 2020, it announced that Dapr is transitioning to an open governance model to keep Dapr open and vendor-neutral. Their vision is to have Dapr join an open software foundation soon.