Microsoft (marketing) has, as usual, challenges with naming things :)
And in this case explaining the purpose of the tool is not easy, either.
Essentially it is a "proxy API" for essential cloud services, running as a process or "sidecar", and exposing REST or gRPC API endpoints that can be used from variety of prog languages
with help of SDK libraries.
Dapr - portable, event-driven, serverless runtime.
"Dapr" stands for "Distributed Application Runtime"
Dapper Dapper Tutorial | Dapper Tutorial and Documentation
Not that /dapr/ (ORM)
dapr/dapr: Dapr is a portable, event-driven, runtime for building distributed applications across cloud and edge. @GitHub, using GoLang
docs/concepts at master · dapr/docs
"Dapr injects a side-car (container or process) to each compute unit. The side-car interacts with event triggers and communicates with the compute unit via standard HTTP or gRPC protocols. This enables Dapr to support all existing and future programming languages without requiring you to import frameworks or libraries.
Dapr offers built-in state management, reliable messaging (at least once delivery), triggers and bindings through standard HTTP verbs or gRPC interfaces. This allows you to write stateless, stateful and actor-like services following the same programming paradigm. You can freely choose consistency model, threading model and message delivery patterns.
Dapr runs natively on Kubernetes, as a self hosted binary on your machine, on an IoT device, or as a container that can be injected into any system, in the cloud or on-premises."
podcast interview
Learning Dapr with Haishi Bai @ .NET Rocks! vNext
Kubernetes Akka Actor Framework Dapr on GitHub Dapr Community Service Fabric Dapr Plugin for Visual Studio Code Dapr on NuGet Learning Dapr