Dapr vs Envoy: What are the differences?

Introduction

Dapr and Envoy are two technologies commonly used in building modern distributed systems. While they both serve different purposes, it is important to understand their key differences in order to effectively utilize them in a system architecture.

1. Runtime vs Proxy: Dapr is a runtime that provides a set of building blocks for distributed applications, including state management, pub/sub messaging, and service invocation. On the other hand, Envoy is a proxy that acts as a gateway between clients and services, providing load balancing, routing, and observability features. Dapr is used to enhance the capabilities of application runtimes, while Envoy focuses on handling network traffic between services.

2. Application Workflow vs Network Traffic: Dapr is primarily concerned with improving the application development workflow by abstracting away the complexities of distributed systems, allowing developers to focus on building business logic. It enables stateful and stateless service communication with standard APIs. In contrast, Envoy focuses on managing and optimizing network traffic between services, offering advanced features like circuit breaking, rate limiting, and traffic splitting.

3. Polyglot vs Language-agnostic: Dapr supports multiple programming languages, making it polyglot. It provides SDKs and language-specific APIs for various languages, allowing developers to use their preferred language for building services. On the other hand, Envoy is language-agnostic and can be used with any programming language, as it operates at the network layer independent of specific programming languages.

4. Service Mesh Capabilities vs Distributed System Patterns: While both Dapr and Envoy can be used in service mesh architectures, Envoy is primarily designed for service mesh use cases. It provides advanced service discovery, load balancing, and traffic management capabilities, making it well-suited for large-scale distributed systems. Dapr, on the other hand, focuses on providing distributed system building blocks that can be used in a variety of architectural patterns, including but not limited to service mesh.

5. Service Invocation vs Proxy Routing: Dapr facilitates service-to-service invocation by providing consistent APIs for communication, allowing services to invoke each other using standard protocols and message formats. It abstracts away the complexities of network communication, making it easier to create resilient and loosely coupled systems. In contrast, Envoy acts as a proxy and routes network traffic between services based on configuration rules. It provides powerful routing capabilities, allowing fine-grained control over traffic flows.

6. Developer Experience vs Network Optimization: Dapr is designed to improve the developer experience by providing high-level abstractions and APIs for common distributed systems patterns. It focuses on minimizing boilerplate code and providing a consistent programming model across various languages. On the other hand, Envoy is focused on optimizing network traffic and providing advanced features for observability, security, and performance.

In summary, Dapr is a runtime for building distributed applications with a focus on developer experience and providing building blocks for various architectural patterns, while Envoy is a proxy that handles network traffic between services, offering advanced features for optimizing and managing traffic flows.