Get ready for the next chapter in Dapr development

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Join Catalyst Product Manager Kendall Roden for a demonstration of Diagrid Catalyst, a developer API platform that works with your existing code and infrastructure.

She'll demonstrate how Catalyst helps with the seamless development and deployment of distributed applications with live examples from this summer's Catalyst Hackathon with AWS.

Catalyst enables faster time to market by providing unified APIs for pub/sub, workflow, and more! Get your hands on this brand-new developer tool and get your questions answered live during the broadcast!

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Webinar Summary:

Diagrid Catalyst is a groundbreaking platform designed to streamline and enhance developer productivity. Kendall Roden's session explored Catalyst’s core offerings, the value it brings to developers, and its integration with the open-source Dapr project.

Introducing Diagrid Catalyst

Catalyst is a fully managed platform that exposes a set of developer-centric APIs, allowing developers to build distributed applications more efficiently. Similar to how Square provides payment APIs, Catalyst offers APIs for stateful orchestration, messaging, service invocation, state management, and event-driven interactions.

As application architectures grow more complex and distributed, Catalyst simplifies the developer experience by abstracting away key applications and infrastructure concerns, thereby reducing operational overhead.

The Role of Dapr in Catalyst

Dapr, an open-source project initiated in 2019, serves as the foundation for Catalyst. It provides APIs for building scalable and portable microservices, widely adopted across industries. Diagrid, founded by the original creators of Dapr, has integrated Dapr’s core functionalities into Catalyst to make it even more accessible to developers outside of Kubernetes environments.

Traditionally, Dapr was confined to Kubernetes, requiring developers to manage their own deployments. Catalyst removes this complexity by offering a fully managed version of Dapr APIs, making microservices development accessible across various cloud providers without requiring Kubernetes expertise.

Core Features of Catalyst

Catalyst offers five primary APIs:

• Workflow API: Enables stateful workflow orchestration, allowing developers to manage complex workflows easily.
• Pub/Sub API: Facilitates distributed messaging for event-driven architectures.
• State API: Provides seamless state management and retrieval across applications.
• Invocation API: Supports direct service-to-service communication across cloud and on-prem environments.
• Bindings API: Connects external resources, enabling event-driven responses and integrations.

These APIs are consumable across different languages and frameworks, with SDKs that ensure seamless integration.

‍Catalyst in Action

Private preview users are already realizing the benefits of Catalyst, such as simplifying the development of a package delivery application by significantly reducing development time and code complexity. Another participant, Wit, demonstrated an invoicing solution that leveraged Catalyst’s APIs to manage key business workflows efficiently.The demo session showcased an order processing workflow using Catalyst’s APIs. The workflow involved order creation, inventory management, payment processing, and shipping, demonstrating the ease of integrating multiple microservices using Catalyst’s platform.‍

Key Benefits of Catalyst

• Infrastructure Agnostic: Catalyst enables applications to run across different cloud platforms without requiring Kubernetes.
• API-Driven: Provides a unified interface to access backend services with minimal configuration.
• Flexible and Scalable: Supports integration with over 30 different services, offering adaptability to different business needs.
• Simplifies Microservices: Reduces the complexity of microservices communication, state management, and event-driven interactions.

The Future of Platform Engineering with Catalyst

‍Diagrid’s mission with Catalyst is to empower developers by eliminating unnecessary complexity in distributed systems. By making Dapr’s capabilities more accessible, Catalyst lowers the barrier to entry for developers looking to build scalable, event-driven applications without the burden of managing infrastructure.With continued enhancements and broader regional availability on the horizon, Catalyst represents the next evolution in platform engineering, reinforcing Diagrid’s commitment to developer productivity and operational efficiency.For developers seeking to streamline their microservices architecture without Kubernetes constraints, Catalyst offers a promising solution to accelerate innovation and optimize workflows.

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