In a recent blog post, Sky Ao, a staff engineer at Alibaba Cloud, details  how Alibaba Cloud uses the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) to support its business growth.

According to Ao,  Alibaba has built a solid, battle-tested, Java-based technology stack over the past decade. As Alibaba’s business rapidly grows while also purchasing other companies, a clear need to support multiple programming languages across varying cloud environments rises. To support this need, Alibaba chose to use a solution with various runtimes running as sidecars. Ao details:

Dapr is the first open-source project to practice the multiple runtime concept. Since its release, Alibaba has paid close attention to Dapr because it had the potential to help solve some of the challenges we’ve encountered. Namely, the sidecar pattern supports multiple languages, making applications more lightweight with the Dapr runtime, replacing the need for client SDKs. This is especially helpful when migrating a product to different environments or deploying it across environments - a process that can be very painful. In this context, the function-oriented programming concept, portable and scalable standard APIs, and platform-neutral and vendor-free design of Dapr make a lot of sense.

Alibaba is developing Dapr components to integrate with more middlewares and infrastructures, including internal products and commercial products supported on Alibaba Cloud. It plans to contribute these components to the Dapr project, including integrations for  Apache Dubbo,  Apache RocketMQ, and others.

#grpc #java #microservices #service mesh