 Okay, I think we can get started. I will make this brief, not to keep you away from all of the amazing content that we have. So hi, everyone, and welcome to Dapper Day 2024. My name is Yaron Schneider. I'm based out of Seattle, Washington. I am a Dapper, a core runtime maintainer, maintainer of several other repositories, a string committee member of the project and one of the original co-creators of Dapper. It's great to have you here today. We have a great day planned out, so much amazing content from customer case studies to how to run Dapper in production. Really, you're gonna find pretty much everything you're looking for. And then also remember, we have a really awesome community that's ready to answer all of your questions on Discord. So feel free to join the community afterwards. Let's talk a little bit about some numbers. So Dapper is growing massively in the last few years, especially after joining CNCF as an incubating project in September of 2021, I think it was. Mark and Cecil, you can keep me honest on that. We've been seeing the project really grow in terms of contributors. So for example, we have over 3,200 individual contributors to the Dapper project from over 400 individual companies. I think it's over 500 now actually. This is amazing. It just goes to show how many application developers need these sort of consistent APIs that allow them to write code reliably and securely on top of platforms that are getting more complex over time. We have over 7,000 members in our Discord community, which is also mind blowing. It's very active. If you have any Dapper question, just go in there. Someone will probably answer your question in less than 48 hours. And us maintainers are also on the Discord channel. So we will be happy to take your questions there. And we have thousands of end users today. You can view some of the case studies on the CNCF website and also on Dapper.io. We are working on more case studies. So my personal ask from you is if you're a Dapper user, there is nothing that helps push Dapper more than a great case study that shows how Dapper solves your problem. We've had 12 Dapper releases since Dapper hit 1.0, which marked its production readiness release. And yeah, we're going strong on adding more and more features in the project working with our community and our steering committee to make sure that Dapper continues to solve developer challenges today. So what have we been doing recently? We've been focused a lot on a few major areas of the project, one of them being security. We've recently released a security audit. The Dapper went. You can also find it on the Dapper docs. If you search for the security audit, this is very important to establish the fact that Dapper really ticks all the boxes when it comes to enterprise grade, security running in highly regulated environments. And we are making more progress on making sure that Dapper is not only secure itself, but that it has security primitives for you to be able to secure your applications. We have been hard at work making more components stable, especially on AWS and GCP for the past year. We've been focused on making more API stable, improving the developer experience. If you haven't checked out Dapper multi-app run, go check it out. It's a really easy way to run multiple Dapper applications locally without needing to resort to external tools like Docker compose that might have some issues with networking. We've invested a lot in documentation, samples and quick starts. Yes, we hear you. It can always be better. The best thing you can do is open up an issue or a PR for content that you think is missing and update the Dapper documentations or samples or quick starts because that's really important. The problem that you're running into today, it would be great if we all make sure that a developer coming into it tomorrow doesn't have to ask the same question. And the most important thing for Dapper is really to continue solving new challenges. And this is really around making sure that Dapper really is kept up to date with the times and adds more and more APIs that solve current developer challenges. One of those examples is workflows. Workflow is an exciting new programming model based on top of actors to run durable executions of your code. So you can process an order and tell it to sleep for 10 days and then do some other processing and let that slip off for a year and then pick up from there. And if anything crashes, it should pick up its state. So this new programming model is very promising. It's already in beta and we are looking to make it stable in this year. So within 2024, probably Q3 or Q4. And where else is the project doing and what else is it, where else is it going? So CNCF graduation, we've talked a little bit about this in the very beginning before the keynote started. Dapper joined as an incubating project. We skipped Sandbox and we are going to be graduating this year, hopefully. We've submitted the graduation. One of the best things about graduation is that once we become a graduate project in the CNCF story can actually get Dapper hoodies, which is extremely important. So today we have t-shirts. I think graduated projects get hoodies, but of course more than that, seriously it puts Dapper on the same line of projects like Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry and a bunch of other technologies that really shaped and continue to shape the world. We are really bent on improving actors, making workflows stable. And to make workflows stable, we need to make actors more stable. So we've heard from the community that they wanna see better support for a large scale usage of actors. We are working hard on that. The upcoming 1.13 release should have a lot of performance improvements for actors. So please go check that out. And of course tackling longstanding community ask like delayed PubSub, the ability to publish a message and say, hey, I want you to publish this message in five days and seven hours from now. And also have native actor support for PubSub so that you can ingest a PubSub event and then spin up an actor instead of you needing to write boilerplate code that does this. So essentially giving actors inbox. And one of the things that we've heard a lot and continue to hear a lot from users is that querying state stores is an incredibly important capability. And so we will be working on that during 2024 with all of our stream committee members. We will come up with a design that is gonna be out in the open to get feedback from the community to make sure that the DAPR key value API which is really good for saving and getting state also allows for more complex use cases like actually querying the database without you needing to resort to a dedicated SDK for that. A new crown API is coming up. Also gonna be the underlying implementation for the workflow and actor reminders. But that crown API will also be a building block on its own that allows users to schedule distributed crown jobs in a stateful way and you will be able to do that at scale. So this is a pretty nice one single API called to be able to really create massively distributed reminders across clusters. And my final ask for you today is really to get involved with the project, open an issue on GitHub, talk to us on Discord, talk to maintainers, talk to other contributors, give feedback on PRs. All those things are really, really important. And if you're running into an issue, please open bug or the GitHub repository whatever GitHub repository is relevant to your issue, whether it's the SDK, the runtime components, Contrib, which is where we keep all of the code that let's dapper interact with the underlying cloud infrastructure, whether it's the CLI or the documentation quick search or samples. Again, I cannot emphasize how important this is to get community feedback because this is our only way to make the project better. So, longstanding asks, bugs, anything you need fixing. On GitHub and on Discord. So, I'm not gonna keep you up any much longer from this amazing content that we have. Thank you so much for joining and back to you, Mark and Cecil. Hey, thank you so much, Neroen.