Yaron Schneider on Dapr and Developer Innovation KubeCon Europe 2025

This is Techron tv. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel and we're back here at Cube Cod in London at the Xcel Conference Center, which is just a huge conference center. Anyway, I want to introduce you to your own, Schneider.

Your Own is with Dapper and welcome to Textron tv. How are you man? I'm great.

Thank you so much for having Me. Great to have you. Yeah.

Yaro, before we talk about Dapper and some of the things I want to talk about, give our audience a little bit of a sense of kind of your journey and Yeah. You got here today. Um, so I'm a software developer by trade.

Um, I started as a junior software developers, as many do, um, inside of pretty large established companies. But very quickly I found myself working for startups, um, who need to move very quickly. So I found myself in the infrastructure space, riding a lot of distributed systems, very, um, hardcore systems, really that need to scale it fast and, um, handle lots of users and spiking traffic.

And so I really got into containers and virtualization from that. Then I joined Microsoft and I fell in love with open source. Um, I created the CDA open source project, which became a graduated CNCF project.

Very cool. In 20 20 18. Worked with Red Hat on that pretty early on.

Then I stepped down from Mega Akido maintainer to really focus on dapper, um, dapper really took off and we'll talk about Dapper in a second. Um, and so from there I started my own company around the Dapper Project and today we're one of the main maintainers together with companies like Alibaba, Intel, and, uh, Microsoft contributing to the Dapper Project. I love it.

Story. Alright, let's jump into Dapper. So there's two aspects to Dapper.

There's sort of the Dapper project, if you will. Yep. And then there's the company Dapper.

There is a company called Dia Grid, and we are the commercial entity behind Dapper. So yeah. You Founded DAG Grid?

Yes, I, I created the Dapper Project and then later on I founded DAG Grid, the company behind Dapper. How do you spell D Grid? So our audience knows D-I-A-G-R-I-D-D-I-A-G-R-I-D On the website, correct.

io. D io, yeah. Married IT direct.

Okay, let's start, go back to Dapper Nest. Yeah. What's it about?

So The CF landscape is all about virtualization and monitoring and networking and a lot of infrastructure stuff, but developers often face themselves, you find themselves needing to write distributed applications in top of Kubernetes, and there's really not much in the CFCF landscape that helps them do that. So if you're a developer, you're like, okay, how do I connect to my cloud infrastructure? How do I monitor it?

How do I make sure that it's secure from the GetGo? How do I connect to A-W-S-M-O DB and now how do I connect to A-W-S-S-Q-S or how do I monitor Kafka rightly? Or how do I put circuit breakers and retries and timeouts?

All of these things are very hard challenges to solve, and this is really where Dapper comes in as one set of APIs that gives developers the ability to really focus on their business logic and not on the interaction with all of the APIs and cloud services within, you know, AWS M, uh, Azure, Google, and the CMCF ecosystem. I love you. Um, we mentioned it was, it's A-C-N-C-F Pro graduate Yes.

No, no. Graduate. It's is gradual.

Yes. And for those in our audience who are not familiar with what it means to be a graduate, it's not easy. No.

You have to take a lot of watches. Full percentage. Yes.

A very small percentage. And, uh, process only gets stricter in with time. Um, so it is really a testament to the journey we did with the Dapper Project and love the end user adoption.

We got, you know, dappers running on the International Space Station by nasa. Right. Um, yeah, it's being deployed by very large companies like HDFC Bank and a lot of others.

And so this is really a testament to, to the journey we made, both with external contributions, people coming into the project and just contributing, um, code or issues to the project. Um, and also the end users, the really big enterprises who took a bet on the project. Excellent.

Could people who just wanna get information on Dapper Yeah. What's the website for that? Dapper io.

ir. All right. Let us know if you don't mind.

We going, you're gonna, the dap the Dapper Project, I take it recently, put out a new report. Yes. What's the report and what's it about?

So The report is about measuring the community growth, end user adoption, really what's important for the community, uh, and our users over a period of one year. Um, so we've had, uh, two more than 200 individual developers from pre-established companies taking the report. And we found some pretty compelling and also surprising things in the report itself.

Um, one of the compelling things we found is that dapper adoption is growing and more companies this today, in this year through through 24, have taken dapper into production as opposed to companies in in 24. So 49% of companies who are engaged with Dapper actually deployed into production that was like 30 something percent last year. So it's a pretty substantial growth.

Sure, yeah. Especially when we're talking about a lot of Fortune 500, fortune 1000 companies. So tell just, what's the name of those?

What is they call? It's called State of Dapper Report. State of DAP report, obviously available on dapper, correct.

It's the oh five assume fabi del the company site. Yes, correct. Alright, I, you know, so the eye-popping statistic is how many companies are actually moving to production with Dapper?

Any other key findings that you want to share? Yeah. Um, so Dapper started when I worked at Microsoft and we had a lot of the Microsoft ecosystem buy into it pretty early on.

And so we, we knew that most of the dapper users were on Microsoft Azure, and this is what we saw from, you know, state of dapper report, um, the, the previous one came out. But now we're seeing actually in this report a huge growth in AWS users. Um, and like Azure usage is growing, but it's not as much as AWS and that is surprising, um, because we, we did make a lot of effort to get into the AWS ecosystem, but actually seeing it come into fruition where a lot of developers are telling us, Hey, I'm actually deploying this on AWS instead of like, you know, Azure, um, is, was, was surprising, but, you know, we kind of like expected it too in, in a way because we did do a lot to, to to be more welcoming to AWS developers.

Uh, and I look nothing, I, I don't play favorites, right? Ville Azure, AWS Aurora, but they all have their specialties, but the fact of the matter is AWS is still a much bigger Yeah. Market than the other for sure.

So not surprising to me either. Um, another thing going on with Dapper though is the, is Egen ai. Talk to us about that a little bit.

Obviously that's a very hot, trendy buzz word right now. Um, I was very skeptical of AI just when it started. You know, I still do.

Um, to be fairly honest, I am concerned about the effects of AI on the human brain and just like entropy and degradation where we don't have to confer ourselves anymore. But in the realm of tech, it can actually automate so many things. And, um, we've actually seen the dapper community ask for dapper integrations with ai, with ai, um, backends.

Um, so for example, developers to, they need to interact with philanthropic or open AI or move to Mistral or hugging face, and they need to do it securely, for example, how do you make sure that the AI doesn't spit out any sensitive information or that you don't put sensitive information from a user prompt, which can literally be anything into the ai. So Dapper is not just like, you know, we're an API to help you, um, connect to the, uh, underlying model. We're also an API that helps you do it securely.

And for a lot of enterprise, this is really, really important. So Daper, for example, will make sure that, uh, credit card numbers, social security numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, first names, last names, all of that stuff. We get obfuscated as you connect to that ar And what happened, um, with agents is that agents are becoming more and more autonomous.

And the more autonomy you give to the agent, well guess what? More can go wrong. Um, and so dapper really wanted to have a solid foundation where all of your agent interactions, all of these agent ai, um, are actually witnessing and seeing, uh, replays of activities.

Replays is tested, they go wrong if the agent dies, if your cluster goes down, it needs to pick up where it left off and just continue because that's your business. And so Dapper has a very strong track record of reliability with dapper workflows. And so, um, someone came from Nvidia and they wrote, uh, a framework on top of Dapper that uses DAP workflows, that is essentially an agent framework that has all of these reliability guarantees and security guarantees built in right from the get go.

And we've called it Dapper Agents. We released it a month ago. It was a big hit.

Lots of big companies are sharing a lot of interest in it. And yeah, we're hoping to invest more in that. We see where it goes.

Love it. Um, maybe there are people out here who want to get involved in the Dapper Project. What's your best advice to it?

com/dapper/dapper, go to the issued section, find the latest of milestones, see what's important for us, the maintainers, engage with us. Um, also go to Discord. So Dapper Discord, um, talk to us there.

Um, ask, you know, what can you do to help? The Dapper Project will guide you there. And, um, yeah, just, uh, open up PRS and Mauritius.

You, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Talk to us today.

Yes, it was a great conversation. I wanted reinforcing out two websites. io, do io.

And your company site is D ij, RID Io. D-I-J-R-I-D. Also doo Dire.

DIRD IJ, RI io Diag Grid. I agree. You've heard it here.

We're act CubeCon. We got all, oh, we got two more days for elevator coming. So State tuned de sound, Shiel.

We'll be right back.