Book Image

Practical Microservices with Dapr and .NET

By : Davide Bedin
Book Image

Practical Microservices with Dapr and .NET

By: Davide Bedin

Overview of this book

Over the last decade, there has been a huge shift from heavily coded monolithic applications to finer, self-contained microservices. Dapr is a new, open source project by Microsoft that provides proven techniques and best practices for developing modern applications. It offers platform-agnostic features for running your applications on public cloud, on-premises, and even on edge devices. This book will help you get to grips with microservice architectures and how to manage application complexities with Dapr in no time. You'll understand how Dapr offers ease of implementation while allowing you to work with multiple languages and platforms. You'll also understand how Dapr's runtime, services, building blocks, and software development kits (SDKs) help you to simplify the creation of resilient and portable microservices. Dapr provides an event-driven runtime that supports the essential features you need to build microservices, including service invocation, state management, and publish/subscribe messaging. You'll explore all of those in addition to various other advanced features with this practical guide to learning Dapr. By the end of this book, you'll be able to write microservices easily using your choice of language or framework by implementing industry best practices to solve problems related to distributed systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Dapr
4
Section 2: Building Microservices with Dapr
10
Section 3: Deploying and Scaling Dapr Solutions

Chapter 7: Using Actors

In this chapter, you will learn about the powerful virtual actor model, as implemented in Dapr, and how to leverage it in a microservices-styled architecture, along with the pros and cons of different approaches. The actor model enables your Dapr application to efficiently respond to scenarios of high resource contention by streamlining state management.

We will cover the following main topics in this chapter:

  • Using actors in Dapr
  • Actor lifetime, concurrency, and consistency
  • Implementing actors in an e-commerce reservation system

The entry barrier for adopting Actors in Dapr is lower than the complexity behind the core concept of the actor pattern theory. Nonetheless, a solid understanding of the scenarios for Actors – including the ability to recognize bad practices and to avoid any pitfalls – is a prerequisite for their adoption. Therefore, we will start by providing an overview of the actor model before moving on...