Dapr v1.18.0

Dapr 1.18 is a milestone release for the Workflow building block, introducing professional-grade security through identity-based access policies and cryptographic history verification. Beyond Workflows, the release stabilizes critical operational features like high-availability pod anti-affinity, component hot-reloading by default, and the transition to more modern cryptographic standards for service identities.

Sentry: Migration to Ed25519 Keys and 1.17.7 Rollback Floor — You must upgrade to at least 1.17.7 before attempting any rollback from 1.18. Sentry now uses Ed25519 keys for workload identities; older versions cannot parse these and will crash, leading to service identity failures.

Advanced Workflow Security: Access Policies and Tamper Detection — You can now build enterprise-grade, multi-tenant workflows with zero-trust security. Access policies prevent unauthorized apps from tampering with your workflows, while cryptographic signing ensures workflow history hasn't been altered in the state store.

Workflow Scaling and Context Propagation — Improved workflow efficiency and developer experience. Context propagation eliminates 'stateless' workflow hacks by allowing children to see parent history, while concurrency limits prevent specific workflows from overwhelming your infrastructure.

Hot-Reloading GA and Native Kubernetes Sidecar Support — Deployments are now faster and more resilient. Hot-reloading means you can update components (like state stores or pub/sub) without restarting your application pods, and native sidecar support aligns Dapr with standard Kubernetes lifecycle management.

Stable Jobs API and new Model Context Protocol (MCP) Integration — The Jobs API is now recommended for production use. Additionally, the new MCPServer resource allows you to orchestrate AI model tools directly as durable Dapr workflows, simplifying AI agent integration.