Dapr Graduates CNCF and Connects to WebAssembly

SALT LAKE CITY — Recently, the Microsoft-led Dapr project achieved several significant milestones, including its graduation from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This announcement was made during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. At the event, talks highlighted Dapr’s adaptation to the growing use of WebAssembly (Wasm). In Kubernetes environments, this enables organizations to leverage Wasm’s extended security features, ultra-low latency and other attributes that contribute to its increasing adoption.

Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, has become a favorite among operations teams due to its proven feasibility for distributed systems, including Kubernetes. Among its most appreciated features are robust security mechanisms for enforcing zero-trust policies and its ability to integrate seamlessly across entire infrastructures. Development teams, in particular, often highlight its simple and user-friendly APIs, which are especially helpful in Kubernetes environments. Instead of requiring developers to master complex Kubernetes concepts, commands and infrastructure setup, Dapr allows them to focus on creating problem-solving logic while the runtime handles infrastructure concerns.

Key Milestone

The CNCF graduation is a significant milestone in its own right, underpinned by recent statistics showing the growing acceptance and usage of Dapr across the developer and operations communities. (The specific stats were not provided but would underscore this progress.)

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, the CNCF said in a statement.

“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,” Mark Fussell, a Dapr maintainer and steering committee member, and CEO and co-founder of Diagrid, said in a statement.

Integrated Projects

Projects in which Dapr integrates include OpenTelemetry for observability data, Prometheus for metrics, SPIFFE, the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone, for identifying and securing services, gRPC and CloudEvents 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’s more important than ever for organizations to be able to ship reliable and scalable applications quickly,” Chris Aniszczyk, CTO at CNCF, said in a statement. “Dapr provides a comprehensive solution for developing edge and cloud native applications, saving developers valuable time and freeing them to focus on innovating.”

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The Wasm sidecar for Dapr is gaining traction as well. Since its inception, Dapr was deigned to allow developers to focus on building their applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. With Wasm added, the goal “is to make the surrounding developer experience easier as well,” Engin Diri, senior solutions architect at Pulumi, told me during Rejekts and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon.

Dapr helps to improve the developer experience, since it can be used to create an abstraction layer “around whatever implementation a company chooses,” Diri said. “The development team doesn’t need to worry about the specific technology behind it. For example, they just need a method to publish or subscribe to events, and they can react to the message,” Diri said. “This is the cool part: Developers can focus on delivering value as quickly as possible without worrying about the underlying implementation, and they don’t have to think about whether they’re using Kafka or RabbitMQ because Dapr abstracts these details. With Dapr, you just get an input through the API, and that’s it.”

Dapr can make #WebAssembly easier and #WebAssembly can make deployments with @daprdev faster compared to a container infrastructure. Today, @PulumiCorp‘s Engin Diri’s talk: Next-Level Powers: Enhance Your IDP with the WASM and Dapr Hero Team-Up! at #WasmCon today. @thenewstack pic.twitter.com/SQl7YIAzxK

— BC Gain (@bcamerongain) November 12, 2024

During the demo talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, “Next-Level Powers: Enhance Your IDP with the WASM and Dapr Hero Team-Up!,” Diri showed how using WebAssembly provider Fermyon’s open source SpinKube and Dapr with KEDA (Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling) can be used to deliver  “the best developer experience and possibilities,” Diri said. “Let’s take SpinKube to the next level and ask ourselves: How can we help developers be even more productive and think less about everything surrounding them?” Diri said. “If you’re not familiar, this concept is inspired by the French Revolution’s “Triumvirate.” In our case, I’ve created the SpinKube Triumvirate: Dapr, KEDA and SpinKube. Here’s why I think Dapr, KEDA and SpinKube form the perfect trio.”

Focus on Applications

As described above, Dapr provides an abstraction to infrastructure so developers can focus entirely on their creating applications. With Dapr, a sidecar mechanism is automatically injected into a deployment by the Dapr operator, Diri explained during his talk. He showed how developers only need to know there is a component of type Pub/Sub. They do not need to know if it’s Kafka, RabbitMQ or something else, Diri said. Dapr provides an SDK or API to communicate within the application, eliminating unnecessary complexity, Diri said.

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Dapr is built on the actor model, which makes it easier to structure code based on communication patterns (i.e., who communicates with whom), Diri said. This abstraction is extremely helpful. Dapr also consists of multiple building blocks, such as state management, Pub/Sub, security and observability. Developers don’t need to worry about the underlying implementation of these components — it could be RabbitMQ, Kafka or another service. The modular components can be easily implemented, with examples like Key Vault, AWS Secret Manager or HashiCorp Vault for secret management. “As a developer, I don’t need to think about these complexities,” Diri said.

“By combining these pieces — abstracting infrastructure, event-driven scaling and SpinKube for efficient WASM workloads — you get a highly effective system,” Diri said during the talk.