Failure is not an option: durable execution + Dapr = 🚀

Applications break all the time, there could be a network issue, a cloud provider outage, or just a glitch in the matrix. But as a developer, you really need your applications to be resilient without the need to recover databases and restart services manually.

In this session, I'll demonstrate how Dapr Workflow provides durable execution, which enables you to write reliable workflows as code. Dapr is a graduated open source project within the CNCF and used by enterprises such as Zeiss, Grafana, FICO, and NASA to speed up application development.

I'll go into specific workflow features, such as scheduling, sequential and parallel execution, and waiting for external events. I'll show many code samples (in C#) for each of these features and will run the applications using the Dapr CLI to demonstrate their resiliency.

By the end of the session, you will have a good grasp of how durable execution with Dapr workflow and resiliency policies can help you build resilient applications.

Actors vs Workflows: which is best for building distributed applications?

Designing and building distributed systems is hard. It involves many moving parts, such as loosely coupled services, data stores and message brokers. There are also various architectural patterns that can be applied when building these systems, each with their pros and cons.

In this session, I'll show practical use cases that demonstrate both the actor model and service orchestration using workflow as code. I'll be using Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, a graduated CNCF project used by hundreds of organizations to run microservices at scale in production. I'll run examples in C# for both of these patterns and explain their strengths and weaknesses. Topics covered in this session include: state management, concurrency, durable execution, and workflow patterns such as fan-out/fan-in, monitor, and waiting for external events.

By the end of the session, you'll have a good understanding of the actor model and workflow as code and know in which situations to apply them.

Async messaging deep dive with Dapr, take your pub/sub skills to the next level!

Ready to take your pub/sub skills to the next level, regardless of the message broker you're using?

In this session, I'll do a deep-dive into the publish/subscribe API of Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, a graduated CNCF project used by hundreds of organizations that run microservices at scale in production. Dapr provides APIs that abstract away the underlying infrastructure, and in this session we'll look in detail at the pub/sub API that can be used with many different message brokers while the application code remains unchanged.

Topics covered include: the various subscription types such as declarative, programmatic, and dynamic (streaming), bulk publishing, CloudEvents, routing, the outbox pattern, and pub/sub in workflows. For all topics, I'll be doing live demos in C#, and use various message brokers, including Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ, and Redis Streams.

By the end of the session, you'll have a thorough understanding of the capabilities of the Dapr pub/sub API and know how to apply it in your distributed applications.

Reliable Agentic Systems need Durable Execution 🤖

Everybody seems to be building agentic AI systems these days. But can these systems be put in production easily and work reliably under a heavy load? Agentic systems are essentially distributed applications, involving communication across LLM providers, services, and data stores. And luckily, we (the IT industry) have been building distributed systems for decades.

In this session I'll show how Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, a graduated CNCF project, helps to build and run these agentic systems reliably using the durable execution principle that is provided by Dapr Workflow. I'll demonstrate various patterns in .NET for building effective agents such as Prompt Chaining, Routing, Parallelization, Orchestrator-Workers and Evaluator-Optimizer. I'll also use the new LLM Conversation API in Dapr to interact with different LLM providers.

By the end of the session, you'll have a good understanding of how to build agentic systems with Dapr, and when to apply the different agentic patterns.

Durable execution battle: comparing open-source workflow-as-code platforms

As distributed applications grow in complexity, durable execution platforms have proven themselves as a critical component for building reliable, fault-tolerant systems. This session provides a comprehensive comparison of 5 popular open source workflow-as-code solutions: Temporal, Conductor, Dapr, Restate, and Cadence.

In this session, I'll evaluate each system across five dimensions:
1. Developer Experience: How quickly can developers get started? What does the learning curve look like? How intuitive is the programming model?
2. Language Support & Features: Which programming languages are supported? Which workflow-specific features are offered in the platform?
3. Hosting Options: Can you self-host? Are managed cloud offerings available? What are the infrastructure requirements and deployment models?
4. Performance and Scalability: How do these platforms handle high-throughput scenarios? What are the resource requirements?
5. Community & Support: What commercial support options exist? Are there SLAs available? What's the maturity of the ecosystem and community?

You will leave with a clear understanding of the strengths and trade-offs of each system, enabling you to make informed decisions when selecting a durable execution engine for your architecture.

Target Audience: Software architects, platform engineers, backend developers, and technical leaders evaluating durable execution solutions.
Session Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Turning microservice chaos into a beautiful concerto

TL;DR: The demo uses various Dapr workflows, written in C#, to play music with a hardware synthesizer.

Building reliable distributed applications can feel like conducting a sloppy orchestra, where musicians play too loud or can't keep the tempo. As the conductor, you need to set the pace and give instructions to deliver a beautiful performance. When you build microservices and need to coordinate multistep processes, you have to think about the order of execution, time-outs, cascading failures, inconsistent state, and you have very little control to manage the process once it's started.

Dapr Workflow provides a solution through durable execution, a programming model that treats distributed processes like a musical score. Just as a conductor coordinates multiple musicians to play a symphony, Dapr Workflow orchestrates microservices with built-in state persistence, workflow patterns to control the processes in great detail, and workflow management APIs to operate workflows reliably. 

In this session, you'll experience microservice orchestration in a completely new way. I'll run several Dapr workflows, written in .NET, that conduct a musical performance, where each workflow step sends events to a front-end that uses Web MIDI to play virtual and physical instruments in real-time. Watch and hear as distributed services play together! I can't guarantee this performance will be the next Top 40 hit, but it will be fun!

Three reasons to attend:
1. Learn durable execution patterns to write fault-tolerant distributed applications.
2. Learn how to interpret and visualize the workflow history.
3. It's a fun audiovisual performance that involves creative coding and one of my hardware synths!

I need audio capabilities for this session (either via HDMI or direct audio line-in).

Build Durable Microservices with Aspire and Dapr Workflow

Distributed applications fail. Network calls timeout, services crash, and external APIs become unavailable. When building microservices architectures, handling these failures gracefully while maintaining business logic integrity becomes a significant challenge.

Dapr Workflow solves this by providing a durable execution framework that automatically handles retries, failures, and state persistence. Your business logic runs reliably even when underlying infrastructure fails. Dapr is a graduated open source CNCF project trusted by enterprises like Microsoft, Zeiss, and NASA.

In this workshop, I'll guide you through building resilient workflows using Dapr Workflow with .NET and Aspire. We'll start with understanding the benefits of durable workflow systems. I'll show the local development setup based on Aspire, Dapr, and the Diagrid Dashboard for workflow visualization. We'll cover the Workflow SDK, and you'll implement common workflow patterns like fan-out/fan-in, human approval, monitor, and compensation actions. You'll learn how to manage running workflows through the management API, including pausing, resuming, and terminating instances. Finally, I'll show you how to monitor and operate workflows using Diagrid Catalyst.

Reasons to attend:
1. Learn how to build fault-tolerant distributed applications that handle failures automatically without complex custom code.
2. Gain hands-on experience implementing proven workflow patterns that solve common microservices orchestration challenges.
3. Understand how to operationalize durable workflows in production environments with proper monitoring and management.

Participants need to install and initialize the Dapr CLI before starting the workshop:
https://docs.dapr.io/getting-started/install-dapr-cli/
https://docs.dapr.io/getting-started/install-dapr-selfhost/