Sidecar Pattern

Several .NET services in your system call each other over plain, unencrypted HTTP, and every team has written its own authentication logic to make up for it.

A security review finds the real problem: any process on the internal network could call one of these services directly, with no consistent way to verify who's actually calling.

Every team solving the same problem its own way leaves a slightly different gap behind, and one shared gap nobody actually closed. That's exactly what the Sidecar pattern closes.

The Sidecar pattern hands that job to a companion process instead: run Dapr's sidecar process alongside each ASP.NET Core service, handling encryption and identity checking for every call in and out. Do that on Azure Container Apps, and Dapr's built-in integration wires this up automatically, so none of your services' own code ever has to implement authentication itself, and every service gets the exact same enforcement.

Use: Dapr (Azure Container Apps integration)

Let a companion process handle the part every service needs the same way, instead of asking every team to build their own version of it.

A motorcycle's sidecar carries a passenger who handles a separate job, like navigation or carrying cargo, riding right alongside the main rider.

The main rider never has to learn that job themselves. The sidecar passenger just handles it, trip after trip, the same way every time.

It handles a job the service doesn't have to learn, consistently, every single call.