Reducing infrastructure complexity with Dapr

Dutch Microsoft specialist IT organization Wortell provides people with the technology and skills required to be successful in their jobs — from teaching users how to make video calls with Microsoft Teams, to carrying out a migration to the Azure cloud, or helping an IT manager transition to a management organization.

Challenge

Vidara, Wortell's Managed Detection and Response software, had become increasingly complex due to the introduction of new features and services. The application's architecture relies on numerous microservices that interact with Cloud Resources for asynchronous messaging. Each cloud resource includes its own SDK and required specialized knowledge. This escalating complexity demanded more developer expertise and time, negatively affecting new feature development and business objectives.

Solution

Wortell adopted Dapr to manage the growing infrastructure and inter-application communication complexity. Since the Vidara team already utilized Kubernetes (Azure Kubernetes Service, AKS) and deployed applications with Helm charts, Dapr's sidecar architecture proved to be a seamless integration.

The team started with the pub/sub API and component, gradually expanding to additional API components over time. Current usage includes pub/sub messaging, secrets management, and secure service-to-service invocation, with plans for state management API and policy features.

Impact

By adopting Dapr, the team significantly reduced infrastructure-related code complexity across all microservices. The straightforward Dapr APIs allowed developers to delegate infrastructure integration and asynchronous inter-process communication responsibilities to the Dapr runtime, enabling greater focus on business features.

The team were able to remove several software packages and a considerable amount of code from all of their microservices.

Read the full case study on the CNCF website.