Mark Fussell on the Distributed Application Runtime or Dapr - Episode 66

In this week's episode, Jeffrey Palermo welcomes Mark Fussell on to the podcast! Mark works on the Azure Compute team and is the Product Manager for the new Dapr framework (AKA the Distributed Application Runtime.) He has been working at Microsoft for the last 19 years and has been a passionate advocate for building microservice-based applications for the last 10 years. He has a proven track record of building innovative computing platforms, running large scale cloud services, and starting new million-dollar businesses within corporations.

Today, they're going to be discussing Dapr, a new open-source project, and what it can do for developers. Mark explains how Dapr makes it easier for developers to build microservice-based applications, some of the use cases for Dapr, what the current level of maturity for Dapr is right now (and what you can start using it for today vs. what it will be able to do in the future), and how the idea of Dapr first came about.

Topics of Discussion:

[:39] Be sure to visit AzureDevOps.Show for past episodes and show notes!

[:58] About today's episode!

[1:31] Jeffrey welcomes Mark to the show!

[1:44] Mark speaks about his current role and what his journey has been leading up to it.

[4:24] Mark explains some of the difficulties developers face when transitioning to building services (rather than applications.)

[9:32] How did Dapr come about? And what problem does it solve?

[13:35] Are there certain use cases that Dapr is more (and less) focused on?

[17:38] In a normal situation for a synchronized webservice call between A and B, A would have to have a configuration setting for the address of B. Does Dapr change that?

[18:32] Mark provides an example where Dapr fits in very well using Azure Functions.

[20:53] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast's sponsor: Clear Measure.

[21:19] Jeffrey gives some brief announcements.

[23:00] Is it correct to say that the developer experience to be able to consume an event or a call is just to write a method of C# and then Dapr invokes it?

[25:28] Jeffrey and Mark talk simple use cases for Dapr.

[28:29] Can Dapr use any other storage provider you configure whether it be Azure Queue or SQL Database?

[30:47] What's the current level of maturity of Dapr now? And what should people start using it for now vs. what they could use it for in the future?

[33:47] Are they any big upcoming announcements about Dapr on the horizon?

[39:44] Jeffrey thanks Mark for joining the podcast!

[40:07] Mark urges listener to join the Dapr community.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Azure DevOps

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps Bootcamp 2020 — January 16th & 17th in Austin, T.X.

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Pre-order on Amazon here!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook!