DEVOPSdigest

Diagrid announced the latest version of Dapr, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project maintained by Diagrid, Microsoft, Intel, Alibaba, and others, as well as an update to Conductor, a Software as a Service (SaaS) that helps manage, upgrade, and monitor Dapr on Kubernetes clusters.

“The v1.14 update provides many new capabilities for developers building distributed apps,” said Yaron Schneider, co-creator of Dapr and founder and CTO at Diagrid. “Especially improving the scale and performance of Dapr workflows with the new scheduler service, as well as a new API for scheduling cron-like jobs, which has been a strong community request.”

The Dapr 1.14 update introduces several significant new features and improvements.

- Jobs API (Application Programming Interface): Enables developers to schedule and orchestrate jobs for future execution, such as batch processing, maintenance scripts, and database backups.

- Streaming subscriptions: To make consuming subscriptions message topics much easier, streaming subscriptions do not require an HTTP endpoint in an application, making them easy to use in code. They are also dynamic, meaning they allow for adding or removing them at runtime.

- Actors multi-tenancy: To improve security and isolation, the same actor type can be deployed into different namespaces with separate state stores delivering full multi-tenancy.

- Improved HTTP metrics filtering: By using HTTP path matching, the number of metrics for events can be aggregated enabling significant reduction in memory usage and improving CPU performance.

- Performance improvements in actor reminders and workflows: Using the new scheduler service delivers up to 80 times increase in throughput scaling up to millions of reminders and workflow activities as compared with thousands previously.

Dapr is deployed as a sidecar to applications. Also being released is a new Dapr Kubernetes deployment option called Dapr Shared that enables Dapr to run as a pod that can be scaled out or as a per-node DaemonSet, leading to reduced resource usage.

Dapr provides developers with APIs that abstract away the complexity of the most common challenges when building distributed applications. It increases developer productivity by 20-40% with features such as workflow, pub/sub, state management, secret stores, external configuration, bindings, actors, distributed lock, and cryptography. Dapr enables developers to benefit from its built-in security, reliability, and observability capabilities, so they don't need to write boilerplate code to achieve production-ready applications.

“The simplest way to get Dapr 1.14 today is with Diagrid Conductor, which integrates all the new features and is available in a free version,” said Mark Fussell, co-founder and CEO, Diagrid.

The new Component Builder in Conductor provides an intuitive, step-by-step tool that generates the Dapr configuration YAML file. With over 120 components, Dapr supports connecting applications to major cloud services, SaaS offerings, on-premise software, and more. Dapr components simplify interactions with underlying infrastructure, offering developers an easy interface to integrate various services into their applications. Watch this 2-minute video for a quick overview.

Another addition to Conductor are several new advisories that help developers and operators adhere to industry best practices and guidelines. Key new advisories include the following.

- Security best practices: Helps developers enforce Zero Trust Security, scoping resources, configuring access control and securing app-to-Dapr communication.

- Reliability best practices: Provides recommendations for enabling health checks, which enhances resiliency in applications.

- Automated recommendations: Continuously checks Dapr installations for misconfigurations and highlights resolutions, saving time and ensuring adherence to best practices.

“Our goal with Conductor Advisor is to simplify the complexities of developing and operating distributed applications,” said co-founder and CEO of Diagrid, Mark Fussell. “By automating best practices, we enable developers to focus on innovation while ensuring their applications are secure and reliable.”