Dapr graduates to become a CNCF top-level project

Dapr, the Microsoft-incubated open source runtime for helping developers build secure and resilient distributed applications, has graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) pool of incubating projects to become a top-level project at the same level of projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio, and Vitess.

To graduate to this level, a project has to be stable, with clear documentation and a pool of active maintainers, but maybe just as importantly, it needs to have traction in the market.

“Dapr has a single mission: to meet the emerging needs of developers and solve the most complex problems in distributed computing,” said Yaron Schneider, who is a Dapr maintainer and Steering Committee member, as well as the CTO and co-founder of Diagrid, a startup that is commercializing Dapr. “The project has done very well in helping application developers navigate the complexities of cloud native architectures, and the engagement with the CNCF community proved to be an amazing catalyst for the project’s growth and maturity.”

Image Credits:Diagrid

When Dapr launched in late 2019, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich told me that the company saw a need for a project that could take many of the developing patterns around distributed microservice-based applications and wrap them into a single runtime that would free developers from having to reinvent all of these patterns.

“In an era where traffic is king, Dapr has redefined distributed application development by helping developers focus on business logic, and significantly enhancing development efficiency,” said Loong Dai, a Dapr maintainer and Steering Committee member, as well as a cloud engineer at Intel. “As a core maintainer, I’m proud to see many FaaS frameworks and products leveraging Dapr as their runtime.”

The project was first accepted into the CNCF’s incubator in late 2021. Since then, it has been supported by over 3,700 individual contributors from more than 400 organizations, the CNCF said. Today, Dapr has tens of thousands of users, the organization says, including Grafana, HDFC Bank, and Vonage. In total, Dapr’s SDK has been downloaded over 70 million times.

“In today’s competitive environment, it’s more important than ever for organizations to be able to ship reliable and scalable applications quickly,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “Dapr provides a comprehensive solution for developing edge and cloud native applications, saving developers valuable time and freeing them to focus on innovating.”

Looking ahead, the Dapr community plans to include an alpha of a conversational AI API into the next release, which will then allow developers to work with LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral, among others. “The Dapr project’s goal is to continue innovating and providing common software patterns to developers building distributed applications,” the CNCF said.