Techstrong TV: The Need for Dapr

Mark Fussell founded the Distributed Applications Runtime project, Dapr, in 2019 which is one of the fastest-growing open source projects and is changing the landscape of how to easily build distributed applications on platforms like Kubernetes. The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Dapr as a CNCF incubating project. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.

Announcer:                 This is Digital Anarchist.

 

Shimel:                Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us on another segment here for Techstrong TV. My guest for this segment is Mr. Mark Fussell. Hey, Mark, welcome to Techstrong TV.

 

Fussell:                It’s fantastic to be here and to join with you today, Alan.

 

Shimel:                Thanks to – hey, it’s actually our pleasure. You know, Mark, CNCF, open source, Kubernetes, these are kind of the meat and potatoes of our coverage. That, cybersecurity obviously, developers, DevOps, it’s kind of the beat around here. And we get excited when we hear about a new project coming into CNCF, and so I’m really happy to be talking about that today. But before we jump into it, why don’t you share with our audience who’s Mark Fussell? What do you do and –

 

Fussell:                Well, I think that’s a great intro. Yeah, so my name is, yes, my name is Mark. I’m a partner, program manager that works at Microsoft today. I’ve worked at Microsoft many years. I’ve worked in a lot of developer technologies and built a lot of cloud services and cloud systems across Azure, and work greatly in the open source, and I was one of the cofounders of Dapr projects when we first started this a few years ago. So I call myself an open source advocate, creating the open source community, and like to work on building distributed applications and working with developers.

 

Shimel:                Great. And so as you mentioned, you’re one of the co-creators, if you will, of the Dapr project, and that’s D-A-P-R.

 

Fussell:                Right.

 

Shimel:                Why don’t you share with our audience, what does Dapr stand for?

 

Fussell:                Well, Dapr stands for Distributed Application Runtime, and it came about as looking at the problem space that developers had to do and had to build these scalable, distributed applications. So we saw those problems that developers were struggling with and we came up with how do we make their world easier.

 

Shimel:                Excellent. And when did you start the Dapr project, Mark?

 

Fussell:                It was first conceived kind of the end of 2009. We started pulling together ideas from much of our experience of having not only built services ourselves on platforms like Azure, but have really experienced the developer pain that they were going through. There’s been this step change of how developers have to build applications. So it was conceived about 2009, and then we first released it to open source community in October of 2020. Just been out just over two years now.

 

Shimel:                Excellent. So that’s kind of a long gestation period, if you will. Right? Ten years, or about 11 years. What took place during those 11 years?

 

Fussell:                Oh, I must have called it – I said, did I say 2009? It’s 2019.

 

Shimel:                Oh, I’m sorry. All right. I thought you said 2009.

 

Fussell:                Yes.

 

Shimel:                I’m saying, boy, this was, I guess this existed in his head for a while.

 

Fussell:                Yes, I must have, I made a – yeah, I meant 2019. So it wasn’t _____.

 

Shimel:                Got it.

 

Fussell:                We started in –

 

Shimel:                Right, it was just the year. That’s more like it.

 

Fussell:                Yes. Yeah.

 

Shimel:                Yeah, I thought this was like an elephant giving birth or something, you know? It was gonna take a while. But that makes a lot more sense to me. All right. So and of course, Mark, the big news today is, that we’re talking about is that Dapr has now been kind of given a home with the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of Linux Foundation, and it’s officially an incubated project. Right?

 

Fussell:                Correct, yes. And we’re thrilled by this because it signifies the maturity, adoption, the community engagement from a perspective of also sitting on the Dapr Steering and Technical Committee. We’re thrilled that CNCF is embracing the developer ecosystem, and we feel under the guidance of CNCF and the stewardship of that, that Dapr will fully mature and grow and be adopted across may of the developer ecosystems that we’re seeing.

 

Shimel:                Yep. Now, Dapr was already pretty popular to begin with, right? I mean I don’t know if you have metrics you can talk about, but it was one of the more popular projects out there.

 

Fussell:                Well, it’s had a rapid growth. I mean this is what we’re pretty thrilled about. We released it first as the first preview project in October of 2020, so it’s been out there for two years and it’s had a rapid growth to about 15,000 GitHub stars. We have over 1,300 contributors to the project. We have 200,000 page views across the project itself. And the community has rallied around it and built all sorts of components and deliverables into Dapr itself, and I think that’s because it solves good, hard problems for developers. Developers have had this step change that they’ve had to do where they’re moving from developing these very traditional client-server applications in the ’90s and the 2000s and having to build these distributed cloud applications now, and so what does Dapr give them? Dapr gives them these sort of best practices or building blocks that they can use in APIs that enable them to build these portable distributed applications, and so this helps them solve the problems that they’re dealing with, and these sort of APIs allow them to be effective in terms of how they design and build these applications. So yes, the growth has been amazing with, inside the community, and we’re thrilled and we want to keep that going.

 

Shimel:                Absolutely, and that’s great. Great stuff. Now, Mark, our audience, as we spoke about off-camera, is fairly technical. They’re familiar with CNCF and open source in general. They may not be familiar with the lifecycle, if you will, of a CNCF project. Right? Up until maybe last year or the year before, incubation was kind of the first stage of the CNCF folks taking a project under their wing. I think, though, sometime during COVID or around when that first started, they came up with this notion of a sandbox, which is almost like pre-incubation, right, for projects that are not quite as popular yet. So the fact that this project is going right into incubation, not sandbox, I guess means that even though it’s only two years old or thereabouts, it’s got enough momentum and followers and contributors and a big enough community that it’s an incubated project.

 

Fussell:                Correct, yes, and that’s what’s been so exciting for us in terms of the rapid adoption of Dapr inside the developer communities. And I think we’re talking about all developer communities here. So you’re right, yes. Sandbox is open to many projects. Incubating projects inside CNCF establish really core, hard requirements that you have shown due diligence and that you’ve hit fairly significant metrics that CNCF require, things like you have a stable open release that you can build production applications on, that you have real-world applications. We have customers like Alibaba, or adopters like Alibaba and Zeiss, Bosch, and sort of big enterprises who’ve built real applications on top of Dapr and running them in production in terms of top communities that you have a healthy, growing community with over one and a half, 1.3, 1,300 contributors to the Dapr project. We’re seeing a healthy growth of those.

So all of those are sort of fairly strict criteria that CNCF placed upon the project, and the fact that Dapr has met that has shown the thrill that it has inside the developer world. And so that’s where we’d like to continue the momentum with it, and with it now being accepted into CNCF we’re gonna see that accelerate.

 

Shimel:                So let’s talk about that. So now it’s a CNCF project. I’ve had the pleasure, one of the projects that I follow personally – well, two projects that I follow pretty personally in CNCF were Helm and Linkerd. Right? And we’ve got William. So the point I’m trying to make is you as sort of a co-creator of the project, just because it’s now a CNCF incubated project doesn’t mean that you’re absolved from your day-to-day duties of servicing the community, of being a member of the community, of growing the community, of making the project better and the software in it better. You’re still gonna be involved right up to your ears, I assume.

 

Fussell:                Oh, yeah, totally. Yes. In fact, the biggest desire is to open it up to as broad a community as possible, and it’s been desire from the very beginning to make sure Dapr has a vendor-neutral aspect to it all. We have a steering and technical committee that has members on it from Intel, Alibaba, and Microsoft, and we’re gonna be growing that to include other organizations. And we’ve had contributors from across abroad, from including VMware and many other of these organizations. So yes, greater community being actively involved, making sure that remains as a vendor-neutral technology, making sure that many other companies come in and contribute to this is a primary goal of this, because we see Dapr as being very influential with insight, the way you can build cloud native applications.

If I just take a step back and just talk about what Dapr is, Dapr is a set of APIs that allow developers to build these, and codify these best practices that allow developers to build these cloud native applications very easily than they could before. So before you would be struggling about how do I do communication between two services? Dapr solves that by allowing you to discover where those services are, to secure communication between those two services, does retry between them all in case, event of failures. Dapr also sort of codifies an API for publish and subscribe for an event-driven application, so you can actually do events between your applications, and importantly you can plug in any different backing stores of your choice for long-running stateful services, for example. So Dapr allows you to create long-running stateful services through a consistent API where you store state in a backing store.

So these are the problems that developers have to deal with. They have to deal with how to build stateful long-running services, be event driven, and up until now they were given a wonderful platform like Kubernetes, but then they had to go off themselves and build all of the sort of developer infrastructure to build these applications. Dapr now elevates them to become, to give them the superpowers in a consistent way, and this is the key. They key for Dapr is it embraces all developers, whether you’re a Go developer, a Node developer, a Java developer. It doesn’t require you to be boxed in and take on a particular framework. You could come at it from where the technologies you are today because it simply allows you to use one of the APIs or two of the APIs of your choice, and from there you can slowly adopt it and migrate existing code forward to become sort of cloud native and scalable.

And so that’s what we see is why it’s been so successful. It’s not requiring you to throw away your existing code. It allows you to incrementally adopt, use the APIs of your choice, become productive as a developer, and importantly makes your code portable between different sort of clouds, whether that’s public clouds like Azure, AWS, or GCP, or including things on the edge. And that’s kind of been a lot of its value prop, and developers realize that by using Dapr’s APIs they can now become productive in building these cloud native applications.

 

Shimel:                Excellent. And we should mention, only because I think it bears mentioning, Mark, the fact that you are at Microsoft and worked on the cloud team. Obviously Azure is part of it. But Dapr’s not an Azure-specific, and it’s not even, frankly, Kubernetes specific, from what I understand, right?

 

Fussell:                Correct, yes. Yes. Yeah, I mean in no way is Dapr tied into any particular public cloud. It’s no way tied to Azure or GCP or any of these other ones. It can run on any platform. In fact, and is also, what you mentioned, it isn’t even tied to Kubernetes. We have a great case study from a company called Man Group, who took an existing set of VMs that they had inside their own data centers and they built a very, you know, application that was running on Windows that used kind of technologies from the ’90s. They wanted to modernize it all. It was just a set of VMs. They used Dapr to Daprize their existing application. They can do this secure communication. They can use Dapr for managing the state of their applications to make them long-running, and they modernized it. It was just running on a set of VMs inside their own data center. So yes, it can run on a number of different platforms, whether that’s also down to small devices themselves. So it’ll even run on a set of Raspberry Pis as an installation.

 

Shimel:                Really?

 

Fussell:                All the way up to the cloud. And that’s also the beauty of it. You can run it in many of these different environments.

 

Shimel:                Got it. Let’s go return back to CNCF, though. As a CNCF project, though, beyond playing on a bigger stage, there are other advantages, right, of being an incubated project there. Why don’t you share them a little bit with the audience, if you don’t mind?

 

Fussell:                Well, the advantages of being part of CNCF is that it takes it so that it goes into vendor neutral aspect that allows anyone to be able to now contribute to the project, and gives the sort of security guarantees that Dapr will have an evolution independent of any one company. So that’s very important. Then as course of being a part of the incubation project, CNCF provides enormous numbers of resources to help the project grow. It helps our project with evangelism, marketing, and just, and actually just monetary resources around those things. So it gives it great support and allows it to be, grow inside the different communities. So this was always a goal of the project, that we want to see Dapr become an industry standard set of APIs that, in the same way that you could look at Kubernetes has become this sort of de facto platform for anyone to be able to run and to build cloud native applications as a hosting platform, what is the de facto set of APIs that developers will start to use, that they can use to stitch together a lot of these existing cloud native technologies, including use of gRPC in cloud events and SPIFFE and many of the other CNCF adopted technologies together.

And Dapr integrates with those technologies very well, so we see it as bringing a developer ecosystem strongly into CNCF and bringing a set of APIs that we believe will become a standard set that will be used inside the industry.

 

Shimel:                It’s Compute, right? Kubernetes is the new Compute, and this is CNCF kind of owns the stack, if you will. And I say “own,” not the traditional sense of own, but these tools. Wanted to talk a little bit about – well, you know what? We’re actually running low on time. Let’s make sure we hit a few things. For people who want to find out more about Dapr, where do they go?

 

Fussell:                Yeah. The best place they can go to is they can start at dapr.io, that’s D-A-P-R dot I-O, and that just gives you sort of a landing page that gives you an overview. And from there, you can move off into the docs repo and read more about what Dapr does, and I fully encourage you to go off and then start at that point and go to sort of the getting started guide. You can install Dapr very simply with a CLI and go through all that. So dapr.io is the place you’re going to start.

 

Shimel:                Absolutely, and that’s where I’d encourage you, if you’re interested in Dapr, go check it out at dapr.io. Mark, I guess this means we’ll be seeing the Dapr folks at maybe KubeCon CNCF CloudNativeCon. When’s the next one? Valencia in Spain, right, in the spring?

 

Fussell:                Yes. Yeah, I love to hope that. Just this last month in October we actually –

 

Shimel:                LA?

 

Fussell:                – _____ and had a DaprCon ourselves, which was open to the, driven by the community, so inspired by the likes of KubeCon and things like this. We actually had a DaprCon. So go off to – you’ll find a link on our YouTube channel. If you go and look at that, you’ll see that we had a whole day of talks from the community itself, from companies like Legentic, from Man Group, from Zeiss, who talked all about their experiences of using Dapr and what it was like, so go check that out. And I’m hoping that DaprCon goes forward next year and becomes part of KubeCon, because inside KubeCon you get a lot of the other, broader attention from the rest of the ecosystem around these things. So yes, yes, I’m really, really excited about that happening for next year.

 

Shimel:                Cool, man. Hey, Mark, thanks for spending some time with us here at Techstrong TV. You know what, kudos to you and – it’s not easy giving birth, right?

 

Fussell:                No, it’s not.

 

Shimel:                As any woman can testify to. Sometimes we men, we don’t get that. But it’s not easy. It’s not easy bringing a project to this point. And, you know, from here it’s onward and upward, though, too. It’s a great project. I think our audience appreciates it. Appreciate your hard work on it. Keep us posted.

 

Fussell:                Thank you very much. Thank you for your time today, and thank you for having a chance to talk about Dapr. And yes, you’re right, it was hard giving birth, and here we are, and it’s an exciting day.

 

Shimel:                Absolutely. Mark Fussell. Well, he’s from Microsoft, but one of the co-creators of Dapr, a newly incubated project over at CNCF. Check it out. This is Alan Shimel. We’re gonna take a break here on Techstrong TV. We’ll be right back.

 

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