Hey HN community - I'm a software engineer by trade, having spent the majority of my career in writing backend apps, distributed systems and microservices in the cloud. For years I've experienced first hand the frustrations of cobbling together different SDKs, libraries and frameworks, trying to figure out the best way to use a particular pub/sub or database, wasting precious sprint time on infrastructure code and then hoping for the best that my code is able to scale properly in production.

This led me to create the Dapr open-source project in 2019, aimed at reducing the complexity of writing cloud applications. Dapr is now used by some of the largest companies in the world, including Grafana, NVIDIA, NASA and thousands of others.

Since then I've left Microsoft, where Dapr was incubated, and started my own company (Diagrid) to focus on solving pain points for application developers who just want to get stuff done.

I'm excited to share with you Diagrid Catalyst, a fully managed version of Dapr that expands it beyond Kubernetes to any compute platform and provides developers with APIs for creating event-driven applications, long running stateful workloads using durable execution, global service discovery and state management. Catalyst is now in public beta and is completely free to use.

Developing Catalyst also presented interesting challenges to our team in terms of engineering as we're effectively using Kubernetes to run a fleet of "serverless" sidecars. Happy to answer any questions!