How I helped define the vision for the Dapr framework at Amadeus to support developers worldwide

February 16, 2023

4 min read

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It has been around a year since I joined Amadeus as a software engineer, with a focus on ensuring our developers have the tools they need to succeed. I am still relatively early in my career, having graduated four years ago, but that has not prevented me from contributing to Amadeus' progress in the adoption of new technologies. This is the story of how I played a key role in highlighting the Dapr framework to a wider audience in Amadeus.

But first, what is the Dapr framework and why does it matter?

At Amadeus we are partway through a major cloud transformation to move from our own dedicated infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. With points of presence across the world, our software running on Microsoft and other public cloud providers will deliver improved per-formance and greater flexibility for our customers.

Part of this journey involves making our software and services even easier to work with. Eas-ier for our own engineers and easier for third-party engineers at our customers and part-ners. Architecting our systems using microservices makes it simple for developers to take specific data or capabilities from Amadeus, and to build new innovations with them that can run on any number of different public clouds. We often refer to these microservices as Lego blocks, because they can be easily combined with one another to build something new.

While microservices represent the future of software development, this approach comes with challenges. Everyone working with microservices must deal with the challenges of highly distributed systems, whatever it is about configuration, observability, state management, messaging, service to service calls or binding from and to external services. That is where the Dapr framework comes in.

Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) is a framework that helps to build microservices applications. It makes this task easier by hiding most of the complexity of the distributed system.

In addition, Dapr is agnostic of the underlying platform and of the language and frameworks used to build the application.

The Dapr framework was initially kickstarted and sponsored by Microsoft and made availa-ble on an open-source basis around three years ago. The framework provides a common set of APIs that allows microservices to talk and interact with one another securely, no matter the underlying infrastructure.

For a company like Amadeus, this means that if we adopt Dapr for our microservices there is an exceptionally good chance that Dapr ‘Bindings’ (i.e., connectors), among other things, have already been developed by the broader open-source community, and can be used to plug our microservices into a wide variety of different environments. For our customers and partners, this framework makes it easier to manage our microservices, as that would make them more compatible with a variety of cloud set-ups.

How we found Dapr

At Amadeus, we developers have opportunities to attend various tech conferences. All we need to do is to let the developer relations team know where we are going, and they take care of the rest. This is how I ended up attending the Microsoft Build conference in Paris along with four colleagues.

When we do attend conferences, we are invited to host a ‘share back’ session where we outline anything we have learnt during the trip with colleagues. I chose to focus on Dapr. It was clear from presentations I attended and conversations I had that those developers worldwide were beginning to embrace the Dapr framework.

My colleagues agreed that Dapr held promise and it could be a way to simplify our microservices offering. So, I started to test the framework and share my learnings with the group.

At this point I had the chance to discuss that promising technology with our architecture team who make the call on this type of tooling. Indeed, architects in Amadeus have been working on Dapr for some time and they are currently assessing to see if Amadeus should standardize on this framework. Through network, knowledge sharing, brainstorm, and enriching exchanges, I had the opportunity to bring fresh eyes on their work and this experience gave benefits to all of us. We are awaiting the final decision, but I am cautiously optimistic.

I am proud to have joined the on-going technical evolution here at Amadeus. This story implies that an innovative idea or proposal can originate from anywhere in the organization and in a rapidly changing environment, that development teams must embrace this open culture. In my situation, the networking with architects and people I met in the conference put me in a good position to bring disruptive ideas. I do not know if we will standardize on Dapr, but if we do, I will be able to tell this story about my small part in building more interoperable travel technology.

If you liked my blog and would like to read more about what we are doing with Dapr, pleaseclick here.

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