Guests: Mark Fussell (LinkedIn) | Yaron Schneider (LinkedIn)
Company: Diagrid (Twitter)

Building distributed applications can often come with numerous challenges; however, its complexity is often underestimated even though it is something that developers encounter regularly. Dapr aims to tackle these problems, by helping to abstract away some of the complexities for developers so that they can build scalable distributed applications on platforms like Kubernetes quicker and easier. 

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with two guests from Diagrid — CEO and Co-Founder Mark Fussell and Co-Founder and CTO Yaron Schneider. They are also co-creators of the Dapr Project. They go into depth about their history and the evolution of the Dapr Project and Diagrid and how they are helping developers build applications faster.

Key highlights from this video interview are:  

• Fussell and Schneider have a long-standing history of working on distributed systems, platforms, and different technologies. He talks about how this led to the creation of the Dapr Project and how it is helping developers build scalable distributed applications, on platforms like Kubernetes, and from there, to creating Diagrid.
• Schneider talks about the evolution of the Dapr project from when he and Fussell were working at Microsoft. He talks about how they wanted to give developers the ability to use distributed systems outside of Azure Cloud and how since its creation it has garnered a lot of attention from the community. 
• Many cloud vendors are contributing to the project, including Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft, and Intel. Schneider tells us that the end users come from different verticals such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and even NASA. 
• Fussell discusses how Dapr’s key focus is around developer productivity and enabling developers to build their applications faster without the need to build their own plumbing code for common design patterns. 
• Diagrid’s aim is to build solutions, and API platforms to make developers more productive. Fussell talks us through how it is simplifying Kubernetes and the service they have built inside the Diagrid Conductor. He talks us through some of the key features and how it is helping enterprises operate and manage Dapr in production. 
• Many people are running Dapr on Kubernetes where they need to manage and operate it on top of these platforms themselves which can be challenging. Diagrid Conductor takes away some of the complexity of operating Dapr on Kubernetes. Schneider also discusses their second product which is coming out, a serverless, fully-managed Dapr. 
• KubeCon is almost upon us and Diagrid is hoping to meet lots of developers in person there. They will be focusing on talking about their Conductor service and the recent enhancements that have been implemented. They are keen to listen to people’s stories to see where Dapr may fit in as a good solution for them and to see where they can help. 
• Fussell discusses how Dapr is unique in the CNCF space being predominantly developer-focused rather than operator-focused and how it is playing a central role in developers being able to build distributed applications. 

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.