Back in 2019, Microsoft launched Dapr, a new open-source project that made building event-driven distributed applications easier for developers. Like so many popular open-source projects, Dapr spawned its own ecosystem, especially after Microsoft donated it to the Linux Foundation. And as is also so often the case, some of the creators of Dapr — and the related KEDA project — left to found their own companies, including Diagrid, which is launching its fully managed Dapr service into public beta today.
The new service, Catalyst, functions as an API platform, offering developers an alternative to managing their own Dapr installations.
“It’s all about building distributed microservices applications and the complexity that developers face today,” Diagrid CEO and co-founder Mark Fussell told me. “Today, basically, there’s still a mess of frameworks that people put together, repetitive boilerplate code, reinventing the software pattern, and having to stitch together reliability and security into all of that. We addressed a lot of these challenges with the Dapr open source project.”
Catalyst, he said, now allows developers to leverage Dapr, no matter which language they use and which platform they prefer. Previously, Diagrid’s Conductor project was something enterprises had to manage on their own using Kubernetes. Not every company is interested in doing that.
While Catalyst currently supports the core Dapr APIs, the Diagrid team aims to provide support for all of them by early next year.
One of the most interesting ones Catalyst already supports is Workflows. “Workflows is very, very important to developers because it is used in a lot of ways,” Diagrid co-founder and CTO Yaron Schneider said. “For example, we’re seeing a lot of companies using Dapr Workflows to build generative AI workloads. Thales, the large multinational French company — they built their entire Gen AI infrastructure on top of Dapr and we’re seeing more and more of these novel types of workloads using Workflows.” In a way, this also now turns Dapr into an all-purpose integration service.
Companies that want to switch between Dapr and the new fully-managed Catalyst only have to change the API endpoint (assuming they are only using the currently supported features).
“Catalyst is why we founded Diagrid in the first place,” Fussell said. “It’s the very reason because we saw a vision that this complexity and difficulty for developers to build these microservices and distributed applications was not being solved. All the major clouds are still focusing on infrastructure and that’s what they do. They have a really hard time thinking about the application developer space, and then they sort of leave it as an exercise to the reader, as it were, to stitch it all together.”