We run Dapr on GCP using GCP's Memorystore and accessing it with Dapr. Our deployments run on GKE, and we use Dapr for two things: state versioning with Redis, which we only get with Dapr and not with the native OSS clients, and a Dapr API called service invocation to discover and invoke other services across the cluster.

We looked into using a service mesh like Istio/Linkerd for the direct communications part but eventually decided that Dapr's explicit API approach makes more sense for us than a blackbox transparently intercepting our traffic. plus, these meshes were too cumbersome to setup.

Would be interested whether you spent any time getting Istio to work with Dapr and your experience?