mwjfussell

MarkF from the Azure team. We thought so too. Having seen developers reinvent the same capabilities time and time again, and seen the frustration when my favorite framework X did not have a certain capability, we wanted to provide a distributed system building block approach. And one that can be just dropped in with local calls without having to recompile in many different libraries. It is an approach that we have found to provide easier extensibility and also support.

MarkF from Azure team. The actors in Dapr are based on the same virtual actor concept that Orleans has, meaning that they are activated when called and eventually garbage collected. If you are familiar with Orleans, Dapr actors will be familiar. The difference with Dapr is that because it is programming language agnostic with an http/gRPC API the actors can be called from any language (although there are also friendly language SDKs on top).

Creating a new actor follows a local call like http://localhost:3500/v1.0/actors/<actorType>/<actorId>/meth...

for example http://localhost:3500/v1.0/actors/myactor/50/method/getData to call the getData method on myactor with id=50

MarkF from the Azure team. Dapr is not a service mesh, however it will work with service meshes such as itsio, linkerd etc. Dapr does provide direct service-to-service invocation which you can use in place of a service mesh if you want, however Dapr does not handle network policies or traffic management that service meshes do. Dapr is a side-car that is language agnostic, and using http or gRPC provides distributed system building blocks via open APIs for asynchronous pub-sub, stateful services, service discovery and invocation, actors and distributed tracing. All of this is extensible, so you can add new building block capabilities and only choose the use the ones you care about.

MarkF from the Azure team here. The idea is to provide a function like experience with any programming language and then have common capabilities like saving state, sending events that your app can use with local host calls. And make this all extensible with components