 Hi, this is Yoosafim Bhartya and welcome to another episode of TFR. Let's talk. And today we have two guests from Diagrid. Mark first of all, CEO and co-founder, as well as Iran, Schneider co-founder and CTO of the company, as well as co-creators of Dapper Project. Mark, Iran, it's great to have you both on the show. It's fantastic to be here with you. Thank you. It's great to be here. This is the first time I'm talking to you folks, so I would love to know a bit more about the company and the project. So any of you can take the lead and tell us about the company and the project. Well, let me jump in here. Yes, so Yaron and I both spent many years working on distributed systems platforms and different technologies. And whilst we were together working at Microsoft, we came across many scenarios where we worked with developers who had to build these distributed applications that had to solve hard problems. And so we sat down and we thought about how is it that we make developers lives easier. And so we started a project there called Dapper or distributed application runtime. That's all about helping developers build scalable distributed applications on platforms like Kubernetes. And it was very successful as a project. It's taken off like a rocket. It's extremely popular with the community. We have many, many thousands of contributors contributing to part of it all. And so because of that, we thought, wow, we can take this to the next level. We can really impact the industry here. And so we decided to set up our own company called Diagrid. Excellent. Thanks for the story. We have covered Dapper before. But I do want to go into the bit of an original story of Dapper as well is that where did the idea originate and also what happens in most cases with these open source projects that you start a project to solve a specific problem. As the user base and how it grows, the use case, the scope of the project also grows. So if you can talk also about the kind of evolution of the project as well. I think the project started off in a pretty interesting way because both Mark and I were looking at solving the same problem that developers were facing. But we were working at Microsoft at the time for two different teams. I was working at the time for the Azure Incubations team, which was a highly advanced technological team under the office of the CTO in the Microsoft Cloud. Mark was working on another team that was doing distributed systems across a fleet of services inside of Azure. And we're both looking into how to take these services and really give developers the ability to use them outside of Azure Cloud. And while we were doing that, we realized, hey, there is a really big opportunity here to take the tech and the inspiration for the APIs that were designed internally and make them open source and then reach a whole wide new set of user base and developers. And so Mark and I started working together. We created an idea. We kind of like funded it inside of Microsoft. We spun up an engineering team, open sourced it in October of 2019. And yeah, it's been garnering huge attention in the community ever since. Can you talk about what kind of community around, when I say community, it's also the containers, developers who are involved with the project, but also the user community who are using it. In terms of contributors, there's many cloud vendors contributing Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft, companies like Intel, HashiCorp were pretty early contributors to the project. As for end users, they come from all verticals, really healthcare, finance, banking, manufacturing, tech-savvy enterprises, web scale companies, NASA is actually running Dapper in our space on the International Space Station. You can search for that. Many interesting use cases across a wide variety of verticals. And Dapper is very much focused about developer productivity. It's about developers being able to build their applications faster and not having to build their own plumbing code for common design patterns that you see all the time for like microservices architecture. So for example, if you're building an event-driven application where you want to send messages between services, Dapper gives you a pub sub concept and an API that allows you to get into your development fast and get your solutions fast. Or if you want to be able to build a long-running, stateful application, it does state management for you. So these are the sort of things that rather than developers having to figure out exactly themselves, build it and make choices, Dapper is a productivity API that allows to get their solutions fast. Excellent. Thank you. Now let's talk about Diagrid and a perfect example of open source, where there's open source project, but open source alone without commercial backing, it won't survive. Sustainability, we do need a commercial angle. So talk a bit about the relationship between Diagrid and Dapper, how you're helping the community and at the same time how you're helping the user community who not just want Dapper, but they want a lot of additional features support behind that. So let's talk about that. Yeah, so I mean where we are with Diagrid, we see ourselves as a developer focusing company. We want to build solutions and tools and API platform to make developers productive. So one place that we started with today is that we see that many, many developers take Dapper and they run it on top of Kubernetes as a platform in production. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for how you host and run large scale applications. And of course Kubernetes itself has challenges. Anything that you deploy on Kubernetes, you have to manage and run and Dapper amongst all those projects has that as well. It has a control plane that you have to deploy and upgrade and manage. It has a rich of metrics that come from it all. So one place that we are working closely with the community today is that we've built a service inside the Diagrid cloud called Diagrid Conductor and it helps operators and developers manage Dapper running on Kubernetes. So in other words, it gathers the metrics information, it gives them insights to their application, it gives them advice and best practices. There's a lot of insights that we've gained working with hundreds of enterprises that allow them to understand how to run Dapper in production. We sort of codified that into sort of roles and best practices. So this tool Conductor and this service Conductor really allows enterprises to kind of get to grips with operating and managing Dapper in production. And we've seen huge usage of this in terms of their productivity to be able to increase their reliability, increase their security and overall operate Dapper in these production environments on Kubernetes. From Diagrid's perspective, what kind of solutions, just to look at it, what kind of things you're offering to customers and users? So everyone running Dapper on Kubernetes today, they are basically needing to manage and operate Dapper on top of these platforms themselves and that can be very troublesome. It incurs lots of cognitive overhead on top of infrastructure teams. And so we offer a fully automated Dapper on Kubernetes. So that product called Diagrid Conductor really takes away all of the toil of operating Dapper on Kubernetes. And then we have a second product coming out, which is a serverless Dapper, fully managed Dapper that basically takes the Dapper APIs that are really lucrative for developers everywhere and offers them to developers running on serverless platforms like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, App Engine, AWS AppRunner, Vercel Functions, Cloud Flare, all of these edge compute serverless platforms and really accelerate developer productivity by providing them with these ready-made best practices baked into these developer primitives. KubeCon is almost here. Talk a bit about your presence at the event. What kind of things you will be showing at the upcoming KubeCon? Yeah, first we're super excited about KubeCon. It's an amazing audience time to meet developers in person and things. We'll be there, we'll have a booth and come up and meet us. One of the main things we'll be talking about there is our conductive service about a lot of enhancements we've put into it recently, things that help you do your certificate management, how you do visualization and operation of your running Dapper in production. So that's the main thing we're going to be engaging with people there and we'd love to hear your stories. In fact, what we'd like to do more than anything is we'd like to help companies kind of adopt and actually grow their Dapper user base. So we often provide architectural guidance to companies if they want to come along and talk about their stories, the needs that they have. And we are very active also in working into the Dapper community, having our engineering team contribute into that. So often hearing about how Dapper fits into your problem space, how you think it can be a good solution to you and how we can help even contribute solutions to the open source thing that would help your Dapper adapter. So come and talk about architectural guidance for using Dapper as well as the services we offer in our Diagram Cloud. Also, there are many Dapper talks at KubeCon this year, at least three that I know of. So yeah, highly recommend to go check those out because they show a lot of Dapper usage in really interesting scenarios, like autonomous vehicles and Dapper and Wasm, for example. So those are always really interesting because Dapper is really at the forefront of the bleeding edge of distributed systems in Cloud Native. It's pretty interesting actually because Dapper is fairly unique in the CNCF space because many of the technologies are very operator-focused and that thing but Dapper is very much developer-focused technology. And we find that a lot of developers turn up to KubeCon. It's a very important conference for them and Dapper is very central to a developer's capabilities to be able to build these distributed applications. So it's kind of quite unique in terms of one of the technologies that's inside CNCF. Mark, you're on. Thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about Dapper, talk about Diagrid. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show and we'll look forward to meeting you folks at KubeCon as well. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.