Dapr 1.0: Distributed Application Runtime Joins CNCF

Introduction

Dapr 1.0 — Distributed Application Runtime Joins CNCF — was released on November 3, 2021.

This is a practical update aimed at making day‑to‑day Kubernetes work a bit more predictable.

In this release: Dapr 1.0 achieves General Availability and joins CNCF as an incubating project, providing a portable runtime for building microservices with built-in APIs for state, pub/sub, and service invocation.

Distributed Application Runtime

• Sidecar architecture provides application-agnostic APIs for common microservices patterns.
• Language agnostic supports any programming language or framework.
• Portable runs on Kubernetes, virtual machines, edge devices, and containerized environments.
• Event-driven enables reactive architectures with pub/sub messaging and event streams.

Built-in APIs

1. State management provides consistent state storage and retrieval across different backends (Redis, Cosmos DB, etc.).
2. Pub/Sub messaging enables event-driven communication between services with support for multiple message brokers.
3. Service invocation provides secure service-to-service communication with automatic retries and timeouts.
4. Bindings enable integration with external systems (databases, cloud services, message queues) without SDK dependencies.

Security & Reliability

• mTLS provides automatic encryption for service-to-service communication.
• Secret management integrates with cloud provider secret stores and Kubernetes secrets.
• Retry policies and circuit breakers improve resilience to transient failures.
• Observability built-in metrics, tracing, and logging for all Dapr operations.

CNCF Incubation

• Project donation to CNCF ensures long-term sustainability and community governance.
• Ecosystem integration improves compatibility with other CNCF projects.
• Enterprise adoption demonstrates production readiness and reliability.
• Community growth expands with contributions from multiple organizations.

Kubernetes Integration

• Sidecar injection automatically adds Dapr sidecars to pods via annotations.
• Operator support simplifies deployment and management of Dapr in Kubernetes.
• Helm charts provide easy installation and configuration.
• CRDs enable declarative configuration of Dapr components.

Getting Started

helm repo add dapr https://dapr.github.io/helm-charts/
helm install dapr dapr/dapr --namespace dapr-system

Deploy an application with Dapr:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-app
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        dapr.io/enabled: "true"
        dapr.io/app-id: "my-app"
        dapr.io/app-port: "8080"
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: my-app
        image: my-app:latest

Summary

Dapr 1.0 and its CNCF incubation mark a significant milestone in microservices development, providing developers with a consistent, portable runtime for building distributed applications.