Open Source Dapr Adds Large Language Models Interface for Integration with Applications

Streamlines AI development, plus Workflows function now production ready; Dapr project graduates CNCF

Open Source Dapr Adds Large Language Models Interface for Integration with Applications

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Joe Eckert for Diagrid
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KubeCon – Diagrid, provider of enterprise tools and services for building secure, reliable, and portable applications, today announced details of the upcoming release of Dapr, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project maintained by Diagrid, Microsoft, Intel, Alibaba, and others.

As organizations seek to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI), they face a critical challenge of how to reliably customize large language models (LLMs) and integrate AI into their applications. The Dapr 1.15 new Conversation Application Programming Interface (API), will enable developers to rapidly build AI-enhanced applications powered by customized LLMs. Using the conversation API reduces the complexity of interacting with LLMs and enables critical security and reliability functions with capabilities like prompt caching and PII data obfuscation. Also, with Dapr 1.15, the Workflow API that was in beta is upgraded to production-ready status. Workflows enable developers to reliably orchestrate microservices – resulting in reliable, long-running, stateful applications.

“Developers are increasingly being tasked with customizing generic LLMs. Using Dapr, they can code workflows to reliably orchestrate retrieval augmented generation (RAG) pipelines for LLM customization, then use the conversation API to query the LLM, with built-in prompt caching,” said Mark Fussell, co-creator of Dapr and CEO of Diagrid. “An additional benefit of Dapr is that it protects developers as AI technology evolves so it’s possible to switch one LLM technology for another with zero impact on the application. As enterprises strive to maintain competitiveness, architecting AI into applications so it can evolve is critical.”

The CNCF announced Tuesday that the Dapr project achieved graduation from its previous incubation status. Graduation is the highest level a project can attain in CNCF and indicates broad user adoption and maturity. In order to achieve this milestone, Dapr was recognized for its: strong committee governance; security as a fundamental consideration; excellent documentation and contribution guidelines; and an open, engaging community. Tens of thousands of organizations use Dapr to run mission critical applications. Go here to read the blog post with more information.

Also, last week Dapr was named a finalist in the InfoWorld Technology of the Year awards in the “Software Development: Tools” category.

KubeCon attendees can hear more about Dapr 1.15 by attending this session presented by Diagrid chief technology officer and Dapr co-creator Yaron Schneider. Also, Hugo Smitter, senior architect with credit-scoring company FICO, has two sessions talking about use of Dapr to increase deployment flexibility and velocity, as well as building high-scale event-driven applications.

Dapr 1.15 is planned to be available for download in mid-December.

About Dapr

Dapr is an open source Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduation project created by Diagrid founders, Mark Fussell and Yaron Schneider in 2019. Along with the rest of the Diagrid company, they play an active part in leading and contributing to the project. To learn more, visit dapr.io or check out the Dapr community.

Dapr provides developers with APIs that abstract away the complexity of the most common challenges when building distributed applications. It increases developer productivity by 20-40% with features such as workflow, pub/sub, state management, secret stores, jobs scheduler, external configuration, bindings, actors, distributed lock, and cryptography. Dapr enables developers to benefit from its built-in security, reliability, and observability capabilities, so they don't need to write boilerplate code to achieve production-ready applications.

About Diagrid

Diagrid’s mission is to boost developer productivity by building applications based on open source technologies such as Dapr and KEDA, particularly those focused on cloud native and microservice architectures. Diagrid provides developers with productive tools and APIs, so developers can concentrate on what matters: their business. For more information, go to diagrid.io, follow @diagridio on X (Twitter), and check out the Diagrid community or the Dapr community on Discord.