Diagrid Conductor aims to help operations teams manage Dapr in production. The company recently announced a free version of Diagrid Conductor aimed at developers. In this video recorded at KubeCon in Paris, Diagrid CEO and Co-Founder Mark Fussell, discusses how Dapr is helping developers build applications more quickly and how Diagrid’s offerings are helping organizations leverage this technology. He says, “There are lots of developers who wanted an amazing tool for them to visualize their application to diagnostics and debugging, understand the Dapr application and how it was running.”

Dapr open source technology and its applications

• Dapr, the 12th largest project in CNCF, is gaining traction in Europe. Fussell tells us that there have been lots of sessions at KubeCon talking about open source technology and how it is helping developers build their applications.

Dapr and its benefits for developers and operations teams

• Dapr is a set of APIs that help developers build applications quickly. Fussell explains how developers can combine the APIs so that they do not have to reinvent the wheel each time, saving time.
• Fussell discusses Diagrid’s announcement of their free version of Diagrid Conductor. Although the tool was originally focused on operation teams who run Dapr in production scenarios the free version is focused on developers.

Using Diagrid Conductor for distributed applications

• Fussell discusses various use cases spanning different industries, including building business workflow applications and developing event-driven applications. He explains that these applications utilize messaging and communication for building distributed applications.
• Fussell explains how Diagrid Conductor bridges the gap between dev and ops teams who are running Dapr. By providing visualizations the teams can better understand what is happening inside the applications.

Overview of Diagrid’s offerings for Dapr

• Diagrid provides enterprise-grade open-source support for Dapr and in addition, customers can use the paid version of Diagrid Conductor which acts as a tool to help manage it. Fussell explains some of the benefits of the paid version.
• Fussell tells us why the free version is more targeted to developers and what it offers in comparison.
• Fussell shares what’s on Diagrid’s roadmap for the future, which includes adding more developer functionality, security and reliability features, as well as, its focus on Diagrid Catalyst.

Developer challenges and how Diagrid is helping

• Fussell discusses the challenges developers are facing with stitching together open-source tools, other technologies, and frameworks for mission-critical apps on Kubernetes.
• Fussell explains that Diagrid aims to provide abstractions to help developers build and manage distributed applications more easily and that this was a key focus at AppDeveloperCon.

AI in the developer ecosystem

• Fussell believes that developers will increasingly blend procedural code with specific models tied to their data. He explains that organizations need to leverage their own data to optimize models.
• Even with growing interest in AI, most organizations are still building traditional code.
• Dapr may provide an API for managing the lifecycle of self-built models in the future, but there is competition in this space.

Guest: Mark Fussell (LinkedIn) 
Company: Diagrid (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.