If you can manage a monolithic application correctly, often it’s all you need: building, testing, and deploying is relatively straightforward. If you manage this well—embracing the concepts of  a loosely-coupled monolith—you can get away from a lot of the complexity of modern distributed applications.

In theory, though, I’ve seen monoliths open for abuse. After some time, the monolith becomes complicated, changes are filled with unintended side effects, and it becomes difficult to manage. Even simple changes require full deployments of the entire application, and testing is a nightmare. In these cases, you may want to consider a microservice architecture. With anything else, you need to understand what you’re getting yourself into.

Instead, you’re signing up to manage a bunch of smaller applications with a lot to consider: how can I monitor and observe my services? How can I make them robust and resilient? How can I work with async communication, like messaging and event-driven patterns? When I do need to be synchronous, how can I handle that? How can I scale? Did I mention it has to be cloud-native through containerization and a container orchestrator like Kubernetes?

Three months after your stakeholders ask you to build a shopping cart, you’re looking at an app filled with complex dependencies, cobbled-together SDKs, and complicated configuration setups. You now spend your days futzing with YAML files—and believe me, some days it’s a word dangerously close to futzing—and you can’t help but wonder: wasn’t I supposed to be developing things?

Dapr, or Distributed Application Runtime, is here to help. Production-ready  since February and sponsored by Microsoft, it manages distributed applications for you through a “building blocks” mechanism. These pluggable components manage the various layers of complexity for you:

• State management
• Invoking services
• Bindings
• Observability
• Secrets
• Actors

In these cases, you tell Dapr which “component to use”—like Redis or SQL Server, for instance—and Dapr will handle the rest for you through a singular SDK or API. While you may be worried about a single layer of abstraction, this provides a lot of value over other options like Istio or Orleans: one SDK to manage all your complexity.

#microservices #dapr