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!
About the speaker
Marc Duiker
Marc is a Sr Developer Advocate at Diagrid and enjoys sharing knowledge on how to build distributed applications. He's one of the Dapr Community Managers, and he loves helping developers to achieve more every day.
You might have seen Marc at a developer meetup or conference, since he's a regular speaker and event-organizer in the area of Dapr, Azure cloud, and serverless technologies. From 2019 to 2025 Marc received the Microsoft Azure MVP award for his community contributions.
In his spare time, Marc likes to give attention to the creative part of his brain. He likes to create pixel art (check out VSCode Pets), code visuals & music, and create an occasional retro game.
