It was back in 2019 at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando when I discovered a new project referred to as Distributed Application Runtime, or Dapr for short. This immediately caught my attention and Mark Russinovich did an amazing job presenting this to the audience.

Dapr is quite an interesting project for me in many ways. First of all, software architecture is near and dear to my heart and Dapr solves a lot of the challenges developers typically face when designing and implementing applications. Its portable, event-driven runtime makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices applications that run on the cloud or edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

As a side project, I recently worked on creating a mobile app for Android (and iOS to be completed). To be honest, the development effort was quite straight forward. The development stack focused on Xamarin, because I do not know a thing about creating a native app for Android nor iOS. But, I do know C# … so, for me this was a natural choice :-)

My knowledge in the area of Xamarin was quite limited and I did not create an app for Android or iOS before. However, the path from idea to prototyping was really smooth. There are a ton of kickstart packages out there and the documentation is amazing. You’ll find tons of articles, knowledge base and other posts that are really helpful.

The path towards cloud-native applications is being adopted by more and more companies. For green-field applications this is a natural choice to architect your applications in a way so that they can be developed, deployed and operated in a cloud environment. This of course could mean on-prem, hybrid or public cloud.

When thinking about your heritage applications and your desire to modernize those, a cloud migration isn’t typically an easy thing to do. Not primarily because of technical reasons, but typically because they exist for a reason and in many cases these applications are mission-critical. Once you made a transformation decision and you created a business case, the next step is to come up with a suitable roadmap for the application. In a previous post, I described the major approaches of such a transformation. In my opinion there is only one suitable way if you truly want to leverage cloud-native concepts and make use of benefits from a cloud deployment … and that is a re-architecture.

DevOps is one of the key topics currently in the world of IT. However, it is also relevant for businesses and enterprises. We are living in a very disruptive economy nowadays and every company needs to have a plan in place on how to deal with such disruption. This applies to companies in each and every industry.

There is a lot of buzz going on and every giant software vendor proposes its own methodology around DevOps. Basically, it comes down to delivering faster, with better agility and continuous productivity gains while improving delivered quality.