When planning to build a distributed application, developers must consider various patterns and technologies for intra-service communication, state management, secret stores, and securing connections. The Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) aims to simplify this process by providing a set of building blocks that abstract specific implementations, saving developers from integrating multiple SDKs or knowing the specifics of the technology implementing these capabilities. Dapr offers benefits such as simpler code, language agnosticism, high portability, security, and observability, making it easier for developers to build and deploy distributed applications securely and instrument them for observation. With its open source project and production-ready v1.0 release, Dapr is now being used by several large and small companies to build business-critical applications.