Using actors in Dapr
The actor model in Dapr adopts the concept of virtual actors: a simplified approach to a complex combination of design challenges. Virtual actors originate from the Microsoft Orleans project – a project that inspired the design of Dapr. If you want to deepen your knowledge of its history, the respective research paper can be found at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/orleans-virtual-actors/.
In the virtual actor pattern, the state and behavior of a service are tightly intertwined, and the actor’s lifetime becomes orchestrated by an external service or runtime. Because of this, the developers are lifted from the responsibility of governing concurrent access to the resource (the virtual actor) and its underlying state.
These concepts will become clearer when we analyze how the virtual actor pattern is implemented in Dapr in the next section.