Nov 6, 2023
Announcing Diagrid Catalyst
Unified APIs for messaging, data, and workflows
Today we announced Diagrid Catalyst - Developer APIs for event meshes, workflow orchestration and state management that work with your existing code and infrastructure, powered by open-source Dapr. Sign up free for early access today.
The Next Chapter in the Dapr Story
Just over a year ago, we released Diagrid Conductor to help organizations fully automate Dapr on any Kubernetes cluster, giving them a single pane of glass to manage their Dapr installations. Today, leading companies including IBM, Carl Zeiss, Sharper Image Online, Schréder and others are using Conductor to operate Dapr in production.
We are continuing our mission to solve the root cause of the pain points developers are facing today - fragmentation. An ever increasing number of libraries, frameworks, cloud services and infrastructure lead to code sprawl, refactorings, lock-in and security vulnerabilities, forcing developers to become experts of everything and ship code that’s hard to maintain. Switching between technologies is a risky, incredibly complex and costly process.
Announcing Diagrid Catalyst
That’s why we’re incredibly excited to announce Diagrid Catalyst - Unified developer APIs for messaging, data and workflow based on the popular Dapr open-source project used by thousands of companies. Catalyst enables developers to build scalable architectures including durable workflows, complex event-meshes, data multi-tenancy, secure cross-cloud service discovery and coordinated transactions among others, while providing security and resiliency to dozens of cloud services. Catalyst runs as-a-service so there’s nothing to install or manage, works with your existing infrastructure and can be accessed securely from code running in any cloud or on-premises datacenter. Catalyst is in early access, and we are now accepting a limited number of developers to try it out - we encourage you to sign up for free today.
We also announced serverless pub/sub and key/value store services, accessible via the Catalyst gRPC and REST APIs. This serverless infrastructure eliminates operational maintenance without sacrificing security and performance, whilst automatically scaling with your usage regardless of where your code is running.
Diagrid Catalyst: Freedom from Fragmentation
You might not know it as fragmentation, but you surely recognize some or all of its symptoms: boilerplate filled, tightly coupled business and infrastructure code despite your best efforts. Fragmentation also surfaces as increased attack surface areas due to a growing number of dependencies and code to maintain. Let’s dig into these symptoms and see how Catalyst helps developers address them.
Eliminating Code Sprawl
Catalyst removes boilerplate code by providing developers with APIs that encapsulate software patterns and best practices such as durable executions, service discovery, transactional outbox, pub/sub, key/value state access and many more. By connecting your existing infrastructure to the Catalyst APIs you get capabilities and features like golden metrics, tracing, circuit breakers, timeouts, retries, access policies and authentication among others.
No More Lock-In
Choosing a technology is a big commitment. Changing it further down the road requires large refactorings leading to instabilities and slowing down your releases. Catalyst provides developers with APIs that remain consistent while the underlying infrastructure can be swapped out with little to no code changes. For teams using multiple programming languages or running in multiple clouds, Catalyst provides a single interface for interacting with the underlying infrastructure, drastically reducing the amount of code and maintenance you’re on the hook for.
Reducing Security Vulnerabilities
Let’s face it - the most secure software supply chain is the one you don't use. Catalyst makes your code leaner and more secure by providing you with APIs to interact with your infrastructure, instead of needing to pull in dozens of libraries each with its own hundreds of dependencies.
Catalyst also provides developers and ops teams with holistic zero trust principles - you can use Catalyst to make your existing databases multi-tenant, create access policies, enable per-app data isolation and use rate limiters to prevent DDoS attacks on both your apps and infrastructure, among other things. Using Catalyst’s federated identity, you can seamlessly flow an application’s identity from your code to the underlying infrastructure.
Developer APIs for secure and reliable systems
Catalyst lowers cost of ownership for code and infrastructure, while enabling a faster time to market and better use of developer resources by providing:
Unified APIs: Consumption-based APIs implementing industry-standard patterns for:
- Request/Response synchronous messaging
- Publish/Subscribe asynchronous messaging
- Key/Value state management
- Workflow orchestration
- Bindings: connectors to message external systems
Common to all APIs are a consistent set of capabilities:
- Zero tust security: Enforce security across applications and existing infrastructure by providing centralized RBAC, access policies, authentication and federated identities.
- Reliability and fault tolerance: Employ circuit breakers, retries, timeouts and rate limiting for applications and existing infrastructure.
- Infrastructure flexibility: Swap infrastructure services with zero code changes, preventing vendor lock-in, future-proofing designs and easing code portability.
- Serverless infrastructure services: Fully offload infrastructure management with managed database and message brokers ready in seconds, that scale with demand and zero operational overhead.
Built On Open Source
In 2019 we created and open-sourced the CNCF Dapr project, which has attracted over 3,000 individual contributors from hundreds of companies and is used by large enterprises like HDFC Bank, NASA, Bosch, ZScaler, Rakuten, IBM, Dell, Alibaba Cloud and many others to power their critical infrastructure. The recent State of Dapr Survey showed that the majority of Dapr users save over 30% of their developer’s time by switching to Dapr.
Catalyst is 100% compatible with the Dapr APIs and now brings the powerful cloud-native APIs of Dapr to developers running outside of Kubernetes, in virtually any FaaS, CaaS or edge cloud platform.
Getting Started With Catalyst
Using Catalyst APIs in your app is as easy as 1-2-3:
1. Create An App ID
Create an application identity (App ID) representing your app in Catalyst. An App ID gives you an API endpoint that handles only your app’s traffic, along with access policies, authentication, resiliency and much more.
2. Connect To your backing services
An App ID can securely connect to databases, message brokers and other infrastructure you have that’s running on any cloud or on-premises datacenter.
3. Call an API
Using any programming language, invoke Catalyst APIs va gRPC or REST and enjoy powerful features like auditing, retries, circuit breakers, OIDC auth, zero-touch telemetry, multi-tenancy and dozens more.
Catalyst Demo
Watch Diagrid Product Manager Kendall Roden demonstrate key Catalyst concepts in this short video.
Try out Catalyst today
Join our November 16th Webinar for a demo-rich introduction to Catalyst.
Diagrid’s mission is to help developers solve the hard problems of distributed application development and we look forward to engaging with every developer from any community. We're excited to see what you build with Catalyst and look forward to connecting with you.
You can sign up for the free Catalyst early access here.
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