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

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. The developers are lifted from the responsibility of governing concurrent access to the resource (the virtual actor) and to its underlying state.

These concepts will become clearer when we analyze how the virtual actor pattern is implemented in Dapr in the next section.

Introduction to the actor pattern

In Dapr, the interaction between a client and a service...