Dapr Placement control plane service overview

The Dapr Placement service is used to calculate and distribute distributed hash tables for the location of Dapr actors running in self-hosted mode or on Kubernetes. This hash table maps actor IDs to pods or processes so a Dapr application can communicate with the actor.Anytime a Dapr application activates a Dapr actor, the placement updates the hash tables with the latest actor locations.

Self-hosted mode

The placement service Docker container is started automatically as part of dapr init. It can also be run manually as a process if you are running in slim-init mode.

Kubernetes mode

The placement 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.