Dapr: the breakthrough in developing modern distributed applications. What it can do for you.

Introduction

A breakthrough approach to developing modern distributed applications is the Distributed Application Runtime or Dapr.

What’s Dapr?

The Dapr project brought together developers from various backgrounds to address some of the most challenging problems associated with creating distributed applications today.

While Dapr began as a prototype for tooling for microservice development, it became a hugely popular open-source project. Microsoft sponsors Dapr, working closely with users and the open-source community.

Why Dapr?

Complexity is the most significant issue that modern distributed applications face today.

Dapr addresses complexity by simplifying the plumbing behind distributed applications required for running microservices. It provides a “dynamic glue” that binds your application with infrastructure capabilities from the Dapr runtime.

Using Dapr, your service has no SDK, library, or direct reference to the underlying component. For example, you can change service state stores from Redis to Oracle or Cassandra without code changes.

And while language-specific SDKs enhance the software development experience, Dapr is platform-agnostic.

Under the hood, Dapr’s programming model provides microservice capabilities through standard HTTP/gRPC communication protocols. Any programming platform can call Dapr via its native HTTP and gRPC APIs. In addition, Dapr provides language-specific SDKs for popular development platforms. Dapr v1.0 includes Go, Node.js, Python, .NET, Java, and JavaScript support.

Dapr building blocks expose distributed application capabilities that your application can consume while remaining highly portable across diverse environments it can run in.

How?

Dapr gives you a language-agnostic runtime mechanism to bind services with the underlying infrastructure. So while there are SDKs for specific languages, they are just mapped to the underlying building blocks exposing core microservice capabilities. There is a tremendous opportunity to further simplify Dapr capabilities with simplified conventions for specific programming languages like C#.

Here is where Truth Shield’s Applinate open-source .NET project comes in to help you build. NET microservices faster by focusing more on business value and less on infrastructure plumbing concerns.

While Dapr is a powerful tool, it only gets you part of the way because designing viable microservices is still challenging, no matter what infrastructure you use.

Like Dapr, Applinate guides you through powerful conventions for creating microservices aligned with industry best practices.

While you can use the Dapr infrastructure independently, Applinate offers highly customized assets for the development of .NET SaaS microservices systems. And, because Applinate provides language-specific integrations and patterns, it further simplifies your microservice development.

You can extend Applinate to run on any infrastructure, including Dapr. And while we have an open-source add-in to run on Dapr (coming in the next week or two), Applinate does not lock you into any infrastructure decisions.

Because technological innovation accelerates at the speed of light, Applinate is essential for modern .NET software development.

Applinate gives you microservice best practices right out of the box while preventing lock-in.

You can build applications on Dapr right now, and when new microservice innovations come out tomorrow, you can switch to them easily. You get industry best practices for microservice development baked into Applinate to boost your software development for free.

When new ideas drive improvements in microservice infrastructure, you can make changes quickly without changing a single line of code.

The Takeaway.

Software development today suffers from complexity. Typical applications sag under the weight of complexity as they mature.

And if you have to design, build, and maintain microservices yourself to be future-proof, highly scalable, distributed, and reliable software, your level of complexity goes through the roof without the right tools.

And today, we all need tools to help, so it’s only natural that runtime infrastructure utilities like Dapr appear.

But no one knows where things will go. All we know is that the tech industry will continue to grow. So you need to think ahead and prepare for the future. If you want your business to last, you can’t change all of your systems every time a new idea revolutionizes how we produce software.

And what most people don’t realize today is that most of your software development investments go to boilerplate plumbing code.

Less than 10% of the code has to do with the ostensible purpose of the system; the rest deals with input-output, data validation, data structure maintenance, and other housekeeping. - Mary Shaw - Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, known advancements in software architecture

Do you create .NET SaaS microservice systems? Want to avoid system decay today, requiring risky rebuilds tomorrow? Want your business to compete far into the future?

Don’t get left behind!

Imagine the boost you can get for your productivity today when you avoid researching, learning, designing, building, testing, and maintaining boilerplate microservice plumbing.

To be competitive in the future, it’s clear that everyone needs to use the breakthroughs in microservice development that are happening right now.

Of course, it’s entirely up to you to figure out what’s best for your business.

But think through using Applinate with Dapr to save up to 90% of the time and money you spend today building modern systems. As a bonus, you won’t have to change a single line of code to take advantage of tomorrow’s technological advances for microservice infrastructure.

Best wishes and warm regards -Matt

By the way….

Are you looking for a solution to help you build better .NET SaaS software?

Applinate is a tool that makes it easy to build, deploy, and manage microservices. It enables you to avoid the time, cost, and risks of researching, learning, designing, building, testing, and maintaining boilerplate microservice plumbing.

Small custom software development projects can cost between $50,000 to $1,000,000. Large projects easily reach tens of millions of dollars, depending on what you need. In 2020, the global business software and services market was at $389.86 billion and growing fast.

I made Applinate to make your life easier by cutting up to 90% of the work you have to put into building modern software systems with microservices.

Are you interested in cutting your overall lifetime project cost by 10x with a small upfront investment? You’ll be excited to know all the tools are available today; you probably just need help to get started.

Do you want to deliver better software faster? Truth Shield can help with any part of product development, from coming up with ideas to making sure they are good to designing and building the product. We can also help get your team up to speed quickly.

Click here to learn more today!