dapr

Overview of dapr

What it is

Dapr is an open-source portable runtime designed for building distributed applications across cloud and edge. It combines event-driven architecture with workflow orchestration and provides durable execution, secure service-to-service communication, state management, and event-driven messaging. Dapr runs as a sidecar, offering a consistent set of APIs over HTTP and gRPC that work on Kubernetes, cloud, edge, or a laptop, with native SDKs for .NET, Java, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Rust. It is a graduated CNCF project.

Key features

• Durable execution with Workflows that automatically persist progress and resume from the last completed step after crashes, restarts, or failures.
• Secure by design with mutual TLS (mTLS), workload identity, fine-grained authorization policies, and secret management.
• Verifiable execution providing evidence of work origin, execution lineage, and input/output authenticity for auditable workflows.
• Distributed application APIs including Service Invocation, State Management, Pub/Sub, Actors, Conversation (LLM integration), Bindings, Secrets, Configuration, Distributed Lock, Cryptography, and Jobs.
• Runs anywhere on Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMs, bare metal, edge, IoT, and air-gapped deployments, with a lightweight ~58MB binary using ~4MB memory.

Use cases

• Building reliable AI agents with durable execution, multi-agent orchestration, and human-in-the-loop approvals.
• Automating business-critical workflows such as customer onboarding, order processing, and document processing.
• Implementing event-driven systems and microservices with secure service-to-service communication and state management.
• Compliance-sensitive environments (financial services, healthcare, government) requiring auditable and verifiable execution.

Getting started

bash # Install Dapr CLI (see full instructions at https://docs.dapr.io/getting-started/install-dapr-cli/) curl -fsSL https://dapr.io/install.sh | /bin/bash # Initialize Dapr locally dapr init # Run a sample application dapr run --app-id myapp --app-port 5000 --dapr-http-port 3500 dotnet run

License and pricing

Dapr is licensed under Apache-2.0 and is open source.

Based on the project's public README and repository metadata.