Dapr Sentry control plane service overview

The Dapr Sentry service manages mTLS between services and acts as a certificate authority. It generates mTLS certificates and distributes them to any running sidecars. This allows sidecars to communicate with encrypted, mTLS traffic. For more information read the sidecar-to-sidecar communication overview.

Self-hosted mode

The Sentry service Docker container is not started automatically as part of dapr init. However it can be executed manually by following the instructions for setting up mutual TLS.

It can also be run manually as a process if you are running in slim-init mode.

Kubernetes mode

The sentry service is deployed as part of dapr init -k, or via the Dapr Helm charts. For more information on running Dapr on Kubernetes, visit the Kubernetes hosting page.

Further reading

• Security overview
• Self-hosted mode
• Kubernetes mode