Davide Bedin - Practical Microservices with Dapr and .NET: A developers guide to effortlessly building cloud-native applications with a language-agnostic runtime

A developer's guide to build cloud native applications using the Dapr event-driven runtime

Davide Bedin

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

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First published: December 2020

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To Silvia, Abramo, and Elia: nothing would have been possible without you.

Davide Bedin

Packt.com

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A major wave of enterprise cloud adoption is underway and with this, we've seen a shift to "cloud-native" development often built with microservice architectures, both stateless and stateful, that run on the cloud and edge and that embrace the diversity of languages and frameworks available. This shift has realized massive scale and efficiency, however, it has also brought with it significant challenges, putting the burden of becoming distributed systems experts on enterprise developers and often requiring them to learn and be productive in many languages, frameworks, and technologies. There is also often the requirement for applications to be portable across the cloud and edge or across different public cloud providers. Enterprises seek to focus on business logic while leaning on platforms to imbue their applications with scale, resiliency, maintainability, elasticity, and the other attributes of cloud-native architectures.

As we observed this shift and looked to address the challenges that came with it, Dapr, which was originally called "Actions," originated as an incubation project within the Azure Office of the CTO through the creative exploration of my technical assistants, Haishi Bai and Yaron Schneider. We developed Dapr with the idea that enterprise developers building distributed systems could leverage a "butler" that would handle all the work of building distributed systems for them so they could focus on their application and business logic, hence the top hat reference in the Dapr icon. To do that we looked to build an enterprise developer-focused microservices programming model platform with the tagline "Any Language, Any Framework, Anywhere" that made building distributed applications easy and truly embraced the diversity of languages and frameworks and was portable across any infrastructure, from the public cloud through the hierarchical edge, and even down to single-node IoT devices.

To address the widest range of applications, we built upon the requirements that Actions could run across any infrastructure, including any new infrastructure platform that might emerge, including extensible systems for integration with external event sources and services, supporting any language, having built-in features of microservices architectures such as publish/subscribe and service-invocation semantics, and including both stateless and stateful microservices. As many languages and frameworks were used, we also saw the incredible value of a "butler" that can move and communicate between each of these paradigms in the same way, effectively creating a programming substrate across different ways of writing applications. This unlocked the ability for developers to easily build a microservice application with the best technology for the job, whether functions, containers, web services, and so on, and coordinate them with the common Dapr substrate using the same semantics. We publicly announced the project as Dapr with the v0.1 release in Oct 2019.

Since the initial preview, we've had an overwhelmingly positive response from the developer community, including over 500 contributions to the project external to Microsoft. We are now approaching Dapr v1.0 targeted for release in early 2021, which focuses on production readiness and moving the project toward open governance so that enterprises can be confident to bet on and leverage Dapr in business-critical workloads. We hope you will deliver more impact by focusing on your core business value and leveraging Dapr to do the rest and we are excited to have you join us on this journey as part of the Dapr community at github.com/dapr/dapr.

Mark Russinovich

Azure CTO and Technical Fellow

Microsoft

Davide Bedin is a cloud-native architecture enthusiast, with strong and relevant experience with cloud platforms.

As CTO of an ISV, Davide led its significant transformational process with the objective of creating new solutions based on the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Davide particularly focused on the evolution of distributed computing to service-oriented architectures, and ultimately microservices, spending most of his developer career creating web services.

As a cloud solution architect at Microsoft, Davide is responsible for the guidance and support of enterprise customers in embracing the cloud paradigm, a key enabler of their digital transformation; lately, he also plays with Dapr.