Dapr is a runtime for building distributed applications across cloud and edge that addresses challenges like service discovery, communication between services, maintaining context across transactions, resilience to failures, stress testing without breaking, and performance in high traffic. It provides building blocks like reusable components and handles problems in microservices architectures like service discovery, standardizing API calls, secure communication, retries for failures, and observability/tracing. The document then indicates there will be a demonstration of Dapr.