Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Dapr

93
330
+ 1
9
Ocelot

78
279
+ 1
2
Add tool

Dapr vs Ocelot: What are the differences?

Introduction

Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) and Ocelot are two popular frameworks used in building microservices architectures. While both frameworks aim to make it easier to develop and manage distributed systems, there are several key differences between them.

  1. Architecture and Scope: Dapr is a runtime that provides building blocks for microservices, allowing developers to focus on their business logic without worrying about infrastructure concerns. It supports multiple programming languages and platforms and can be used with any infrastructure or cloud provider. On the other hand, Ocelot is a library specifically designed for building API gateways, focusing on routing and proxying requests between clients and microservices.

  2. Functionality and Features: Dapr offers a wide range of features such as service-to-service invocation, state management, pub/sub messaging, and external resource bindings. It also provides a set of APIs and SDKs for developers to access these features. Ocelot, on the other hand, primarily focuses on routing and load balancing, providing capabilities like path-based routing, load balancing algorithms, and request aggregation.

  3. Configuration and Flexibility: Dapr relies on a declarative configuration model, allowing developers to define their services, bindings, and other resources using YAML or JSON files. It provides a lot of flexibility in terms of configuring and managing services. Ocelot, on the other hand, uses a combination of configuration files and a fluent API for defining routing rules. While it provides some level of flexibility, it might not be as versatile as Dapr when it comes to configuring microservices.

  4. Community and Adoption: Dapr is an open-source project backed by Microsoft and has gained significant traction in the industry. It has a vibrant community with regular contributions and a growing ecosystem of supporting tools and frameworks. On the other hand, Ocelot is also an open-source project but might have a relatively smaller community and ecosystem compared to Dapr.

  5. Integration and Compatibility: Dapr is designed to be highly portable and can be easily integrated with existing applications and services. It can run alongside other frameworks and technologies, making integration seamless. Ocelot, being primarily focused on API gateways, might be more tightly coupled with specific frameworks or technologies, which could limit its compatibility with diverse environments.

  6. Development Paradigm: Dapr promotes a decentralized development approach, where each microservice can be developed and deployed independently. It encourages the use of service-to-service communication and provides tools for inter-service messaging. Ocelot, as an API gateway framework, follows a more centralized development model, where all the routing and proxying logic is handled at the gateway level.

In summary, Dapr and Ocelot differ in terms of their architecture, functionality, configuration model, community support, integration capabilities, and development paradigms. Dapr provides a broader set of features and is more flexible and portable, while Ocelot specializes in API gateway functionalities.

Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Dapr
Pros of Ocelot
  • 3
    Manage inter-service state
  • 2
    MTLS "for free"
  • 2
    App dashboard for rapid log overview
  • 2
    Zipkin app tracing "for free"
  • 1
    Straightforward documentation
  • 1
    Simple configuration

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Dapr
Cons of Ocelot
  • 1
    Additional overhead
    Be the first to leave a con

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Dapr?

    It is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

    What is Ocelot?

    It is aimed at people using .NET running a micro services / service oriented architecture that need a unified point of entry into their system. However it will work with anything that speaks HTTP and run on any platform that ASP.NET Core supports. It manipulates the HttpRequest object into a state specified by its configuration until it reaches a request builder middleware where it creates a HttpRequestMessage object which is used to make a request to a downstream service.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Dapr?
    What companies use Ocelot?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Dapr or Ocelot.
    Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Dapr?
    What tools integrate with Ocelot?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    What are some alternatives to Dapr and Ocelot?
    Istio
    Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.
    Akka
    Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM.
    Orleans
    Orleans is a framework that provides a straightforward approach to building distributed high-scale computing applications, without the need to learn and apply complex concurrency or other scaling patterns. It was created by Microsoft Research and designed for use in the cloud.
    Knative
    Knative provides a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center
    Envoy
    Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.
    See all alternatives