In 2019, Microsoft launched Dapr, a new open source project to make it easier for developers to build event-driven distributed applications. Like many popular open source projects, Dapr has spawned its own ecosystem, especially after Microsoft donated it to the Linux Foundation. And as is often the case, some of the creators of Dapr and the related KEDA project have left to start their own companies, including Diagrid, which is launching its fully managed Dapr service in public beta today.
The new service, Catalyst, acts as an API platform, giving developers an alternative to managing their own Dapr installations.
Image credit: Diagrid
“It's all about building distributed microservices applications and the complexities developers face today,” said Mark Fussell, CEO and co-founder of Diagrid. “Right now, you basically have a mess of frameworks that people put together, repetitive boilerplate code, reinventing software patterns, and then building reliability and security into it all. We've addressed a lot of these challenges with the Dapr open source project.”
He said Catalyst now allows developers to leverage Dapr regardless of the language they use or platform they prefer. Until now, Diagrid's Conductor project required companies to manage it themselves using Kubernetes. Not every company is interested in that.
Catalyst currently supports the core Dapr API, but the Diagrid team aims to support all APIs by early next year.
One of the most interesting features that Catalyst already supports is workflows. “Workflows are really important for developers because they have a wide variety of uses,” says Yaron Schneider, co-founder and CTO at Diagrid. “For example, many companies are building generative AI workloads using Dapr workflows. Thales, a large French multinational, has built its entire Gen AI infrastructure on Dapr, and we're seeing more and more new types of workloads using workflows.” In a way, this also makes Dapr a generic integration service.
Companies that want to switch between Dapr and the new fully managed Catalyst will only need to change their API endpoints (assuming they are only using currently supported features).
“Catalyst is why we founded Diagrid in the first place,” says Fussell, “because we saw a vision that the complexity and difficulty of developers building microservices and distributed applications hadn't been solved. All the big clouds are still focused on infrastructure, that's what they do. It's very hard to think about the application developer space, and we kind of leave it as an exercise for the reader to put it all together.”