Dapr service invocation

Istio is a service mesh—a modernized service networking layer that provides a transparent and language-independent way to flexibly and easily automate application network functions . It is a popular solution for managing the different microservices that make up a cloud-native application.

Istio provides behavioral insights and operational control over the service mesh and the microservices it supports . Using a service mesh reduces the complexity of deployments, and takes some of the burden off of your development teams. Istio’s features let you run a distributed microservice architecture.

Microsoft’s Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) has now graduated to the production-ready version , 16 months after it was released as an alpha project. Dapr is an open-source, Microsoft-incubated project for developers to build event-driven and distributed cloud-native applications.

The service mesh in Kubernetes is typically implemented as a set of network proxies . Deployed alongside a “sidecar” of application code, these proxies serve as an introduction point for service mesh features and manage communication between the microservices.

Popular service meshes include: Linkerd, Istio, Consul, Kuma, and Maesh . Supporting technologies within this space include: Layer 7-aware proxies, such as Envoy, HAProxy, NGINX, and MOSN; and service mesh orchestration, visualization, and understandability tooling, such as SuperGloo, Kiali, and Dive.

Service meshes operate at the network level and trace the network calls between services. Dapr does this with service invocation . Moreover, Dapr also provides observability (tracing and metrics) over pub/sub calls using trace IDs written into the Cloud Events envelope.

Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.