Skip to main content

Dapr workshop

Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) is a free and open-source runtime system designed to support cloud-native and serverless computing It provides APIs that simplify microservice connectivity, enabling developers to write resilient and secure microservices.

Dapr abstracts away the complexity of common challenges developers encounter regularly when building distributed applications, such as service discovery, message broker integration, encryption, observability, and secret management It runs as a sidecar wherever your application runs whether hosted on Kubernetes, VMs, deployed on the cloud, on-premises or on the edge.

Although the documentation is great, it can still be a challenge to start building your first dapr enabled application. Therefore I can recommend the Dapr workshop; it contains several hands-on assignments that will introduce you to Dapr. You will start with a simple microservices application that contains a number of services. In each assignment, you will change a part of the application so it works with Dapr. The Dapr building blocks you will be working with are:

  • Service invocation
  • State-management
  • Publish / Subscribe
  • Bindings
  • Secrets management

It is using a speeding camera setup as the domain, which is interesting enough to show you how Dapr can help in tackling this problem:

More information:

Dapr for .NET Developers - .NET | Microsoft Learn

EdwinVW/dapr-workshop: Workshop that teaches how to apply Dapr to an existing .NET, Java or Python based microservices application. (github.com)

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more