Today, Diagrid unveiled Catalyst, a suite of unified APIs for messaging, data, and workflow, based on the Dapr project. The serverless, fully-managed Dapr offering enables developers to focus on business logic by reducing boilerplate code, and can be used with any cloud and with existing infrastructure. Diagrid made the announcement and provided a preview of Catalyst at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.
Application developers have traditionally had to setup microservice architectures by connecting a wide variety of cloud services and frameworks. Mark Fussell, Diagrid co-founder and CEO, said the wealth of options available for building distributed applications "leads to fragmentation—and with it increased code sprawl, cloud vendor lock-in and security vulnerabilities." Catalyst addresses these concerns with "golden paths using industry patterns" to manage the infrastructure of cloud-native applications.
Diagrid Catalyst overview - Source: Diagrid
Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, is one project covered under the early adopter topic "design for portability" on the 2023 InfoQ Architecture and Design Trends Report. The abstraction model allows architects designing cloud-native applications to separate business logic from implementation details. According to Yaron Schneider, Diagrid co-founder and CTO, "Diagrid Catalyst enables all developers running on any cloud to focus on their core business and remove the hassle of writing repetitive code that results in insecure and unreliable systems."
Dapr is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project that is used by more than 10,000 developers across over 6,000 organizations.
Fussell and Schneider were recently interviewed about Dapr on an episode of the InfoQ Podcast. InfoQ again met up with Schneider to discuss Catalyst.
InfoQ: What are some good use cases for getting started with Catalyst?
Yaron Schneider: Creating event-driven applications using pub/sub, authoring business workflows that span multiple applications, and securely connecting services running in different regions, compute environments and clouds. Catalyst provides easy to use APIs to reduce boilerplate code when interacting with databases and message brokers, and can be used to make more than 20 different databases multi-tenant by default. From a platform perspective, Catalyst provides a platform engineering team the missing link of golden paths to interact with the self-managed infrastructure that is managed by the platform.
InfoQ: What are the benefits of Catalyst versus the current options for using Dapr?
Schneider: Dapr today can be used mostly on Kubernetes and raw VMs. Catalyst opens up the Dapr APIs to millions of developers running on serverless container platforms, functions as a service offerings, and edge computing like Vercel, Cloudflare and others. For an existing Dapr user on Kubernetes, Catalyst can help simplify and reduce the management overhead associated with running and monitoring sidecars and the Dapr control plane.
InfoQ: Dapr is a widely used CNCF project. For the approximately 6,000 organizations currently using Dapr, when does it make sense to switch from their current setup to Catalyst, and when would it not be a good fit?
Schneider: Most organizations running Dapr today are doing so on Kubernetes. While it can certainly work for some as an alternative way to consume Dapr and go without the need to manage Dapr sidecars and compute, there are many who still need the Dapr sidecars running locally in their cluster. For these organizations we have Diagrid Conductor - a fully automated Dapr on K8s offering that makes operating Dapr on K8s a breeze.
InfoQ: What is the pricing model for Catalyst?
Schneider: We are launching an early access program, where the service will be free. Pricing options and additional plans will be introduced next year.
InfoQ: When will Catalyst be generally available? Is there a preview or trial version?
Schneider: Developers will be able to sign up for an early access program on November 6th. Catalyst is expected to become generally available in Q3 ‘24.
InfoQ: Where can people go to learn more?
Schneider: To learn more about Catalyst or to sign up for early access, please visit https://diagrid.io/
catalyst.