The Motivation Behind Dapr: Developer Tooling for Cloud-Native

Yaron explains Dapr's goal to give application developers abstractions for state, pub/sub, secrets, and actors across clouds and languages.

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In this episode we explore how Dapr and KEDA—two CNCF graduated projects—are reshaping cloud-native application development and what that means for observability. From event-driven architectures to autoscaling and service runtime, we discuss how these building blocks fit into modern systems. We discuss major capabilities around resilience, scalability, observability and even agentic AI support.

Our guest for this episode is Yaron Schneider, co-creator of both Dapr and KEDA projects, and co-founder and CTO of Diagrid. He also brings years of leadership at Microsoft on scalable cloud architecture.

You can read the recap posts:

Part 1 - Dapr: https://medium.com/p/eb2f4013d9a1/

Part 2 - KEDA: https://medium.com/p/d74f75c0021a/

Show Notes:

00:00 - episode intro

01:19 - guest intro and Dapr & KEDA intro

04.53 - why Microsoft created KEDA

14:43 - why Microsoft decided to open-source KEDA

16:58 - why Microsoft created Dapr

24:52 - observability in Dapr

33:38 - shifting from logs to traces

37:46 - building a startup around foundation-led open source

46:22 - agentic AI support in Dapr

49:11 - Dapr updates and roadmap

52:15 - KEDA updates and roadmap

53:50 - Dapr at KubeCon NA

55:08 - Jaeger celebrates 10th anniversary

56:13 - OpenTelemetry Collector user survey

56:58 - proposal for a new OTel SIG for resource metadata semantic conventions

1:00:00 - outro

Resources:

Dapr: https://dapr.io/
KEDA: https://keda.sh/

Dapr accepted to graduation, Dec 2024, my LI post: https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:share:7262354292794159105
Announcing Dapr AI Agents: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/03/12/announcing-dapr-ai-agents/
Jaeger 10th anniversary: https://medium.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-at-10-forged-in-community-reborn-in-opentelemetry-621d4eabdeda
Jaeger v2 and alignment with OpenTelemetry: https://medium.com/p/be612dbee774
Proposal for a new OpenTelemetry SIG: Service and Deployment Semantic Conventions: https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/pull/2837/
OTel Collector Follow-up Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfbpqBcCVfmRj_Rk_Sd6zaBGpfzGSBvSZ6CdVn6PPBbbmPIOw/viewform