Show HN: New Agentic AI Framework in CNCF

[yaronsc]

Hi, I'm a Dapr CNCF project maintainer. We've recently released Dapr Agents which provides agentic AI features together with built-in durable execution to guarantee statefulness and reliable agentic workflows that run to completion and retry upon failure. It runs natively on Kubernetes, has built-in OTEL integration and uses a lightweight architecture where agents scale to zero, allowing you to run thousands of agents on commodity hardware. It'd be great if you can test it out and give us feedback.

[jasongill]

A breakdown of how this compares to other popular agentic AI frameworks (which appear to be multiplying by the day) would be helpful - a decision guide of "is this the right package for me", perhaps

[yaronsc]

Makes total sense and we have this as WIP

[mentalgear]

I feel like that at this point, we need an AI agent to compare AI agent frameworks.

And benchmarks. Well thought out, structured, non-cherry-picked benchmarks to highlight which framework does well in what area.

[yaronsc]

Benchmarks are WIP. We're thinking about durability, task latency, agent throughput. What else would you like to see?

[namnnumbr]

Pass^k and not Pass@k (see https://www.philschmid.de/agents-pass-at-k-pass-power-k). Would be a great twofer to see the code used to run the benchmarks as examples.

[yaronsc]

Will take a look, thanks!

[esafak]

This space is crowded and largely undifferentiated. I'd look for MCP support, state management, observability, tests, and a high bus factor to stand out. By these measures, DAPR is not competitive; it would not make my shortlist.

Assuming you knew there are lots of alternatives, what led you to create it?

[yaronsc]

Dapr's state management API supports more than 20 different databases, with the ability to stream data at high scale right into the agent tasks. That's a major differentiator as you can plug in almost any database and message bus into Dapr Agents.

We wanted to create a vendor neutral framework that doesn't over pivot on features that are tied to the backing of a commercial product. The other and no less important point is the ecosystem that Dapr has around messaging and state integrations. A lot of the Agentic AI frameworks you see today will not withstand a restart of the process,let alone complete cluster shutdown. Dapr has durability built-in to handle these catastrophic failures

[esafak]

I'd lead with durability and streaming, back it with benchmarks, and suggest some use cases (e-commerce, etc).

So I might have titled this submission "A durable, streaming agent framework".

[yaronsc]

Good suggestion, thank you