 So we've seen this dramatic rise in fragmentation of code and of complexity, which has driven complexity. And developers today are just literally overwhelmed. What we see, and part of this comes through the platform engineering movement, where people want to consolidate things down into a platform engineering scope. But on top of that, they have to have a set of APIs that are consistent across their application developers. So what we see is this increasing decision of how do I have APIs that my developers have in the same way that Kubernetes brought a set of APIs for hosting and everyone could agree on for the hosting level. What are the APIs that everyone could agree about their application level? So if we can reduce the fragmentation of large numbers of frameworks, but we can agree on a set of APIs around this all, all of a sudden developers from different languages and different frameworks can coordinate together. Hi, this is your host Apil Bhartia and we are here at KubeCon in Chicago and today we have with us once again Mark Fussell, CEO and founder of Diagrid. Mark, it's great to have you on the show again. Thank you, it's wonderful to be here today. Yeah, it's my pleasure to host you again. First of all, we are here at KubeCon. It's almost the end of the day. Everybody is in tired, exhausted. They are waiting for beer. How has been the event so far? It's been fabulous actually so far and talking to many people. For me, I think one of the highlights of the event was App DeveloperCon, which was the first time this co-located event was being held. And App DeveloperCon was something that we initiated with CNCF to get application developers talking about what gets built on top of all this infrastructure. So we had a huge turnover in the audience. The room was packed with 300 people. We talked about designing architectures, developer tools, serverless systems, this sort of thing. From the context of Kubernetes, how much room is there for developers? Well, exactly this. I mean, we come to an event like this. So if you look at the CNCF numbers, 3,000 developers turn up here asking to think about building their business applications. Now they have to understand Kubernetes. They have to understand all those things on top of all. But that's like the baseline for them. They're the ones who generate the money for the company. And so we need to have conversations about application architecture, event-driven applications, how we build workflows. What are all the tools and application designs that the business needs on top of all this? So that's what they have a conversation here for. They need to understand these ops technologies. But at the same time, they want to see things themselves about the applications that get delivered on top of them. For a while, we almost forgot about developers and app developers. Everybody was talking about DevOps, SRAs, platform engineers, DevSecOps. But as you rightly said, developers are the ones that are making the money. Every team in a waste, but that's where the real business value is coming from. With the whole shift-left movement, a lot of things are moving in developers' pipelines also. We talk about that. What does the developer experience look like today? Well, I think the developer experience today is very fragmented. Developers have to look across a whole industry of frameworks and libraries and languages. And the tech sprawler they have to deal with is very, very, very difficult. So you get a lot of this tech fragmentation. I think developers have to also deal with quite a bit of lock-in, where they're locked into particular technologies on a particular cloud, and they want the portability in the open source side of things. So I think you see developers wanting to break the challenges of a lock-in to a particular framework or a particular cloud provider. They want to prevent technology sprawl, and they want to be productive in what they build. So I think there's a lot of movement towards consolidation of frameworks, how they can easily build applications, and that's where DAPA comes in in many ways, which is an open source project. I work on as a maintainer that reduces the amount of code you have to write boilerplate code and makes developers productive building applications without them having to reinvent the wheel or, as I like to say, reinvent the pattern. DAPA and then Diagrid, you know, open source can go only so far. That's the nature of open source because you have to get it to a larger ecosystem, you know, not every, and that's where the commercialization comes at play because then you can fine-tune things for the customers to talk about DAPA and Diagrid. Yeah, so DAPA, which is open source projects, has had a tremendous growth over the last year. We're up to 3,000 contributors inside it all. It's the 10th largest project inside CNCF and we've had big organization from financial organizations, manufacturing, healthcare, all building on top of it all. In fact, we launched a brand new website for that project just a couple of days ago and, you know, it's seen huge growth in helping developers build long running, distributed applications. One of the most exciting things inside DAPA, the project is a workflow engine so you can combine workflow along with a vendor of an applications. But what we also see is that a lot of those developers who are deploying DAPA on top of Kubernetes need some help and they need help with how DAPA gets deployed and upgraded, best practices, they want better security. So that's where we Diagrid come in. We provide a service called Diagrid Conducted that helps to manage on Kubernetes. But we're doing more than that as well. Since we are here at KubeCon, did you folks make an announcement here? Anything, any launches? Yes, we did a launch here at KubeCon. We were excited to launch a new service called Diagrid Catalyst and think of it as hosted DAPA services in the cloud. It's DAPA paths in the cloud framework where you can build your application on any form of compute infrastructure and be able to build applications that communicate across compute, across cloud and really it's about democratizing, building these large scale distributed applications using open frameworks like DAPA but hosting them as an API. And we're pretty excited by this because it means now that any form of developer, whatever language you come from or whatever compute you want to run, it fits with where developers want to run things today. So let me give an example. We've been working with customers who have legacy applications that need to send event messages to new applications. They'll be able to do that through our Diagrid Catalyst by publishing and subscribing messages between two completely disparate apps running on two different platforms based around open APIs and open standards. Earlier we were talking about the whole developer experience. When we look at Kubernetes, we do talk about complexity a lot. How is Diagrid kind of working as a buffer to kind of, you know, up secure that complexity for developers. So they do not waste a lot of their time in all those things and continue to focus. As you said, they are the one who drive the business. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, this is what we've seen. So we've seen this dramatic rise in fragmentation of code and of complexity which has driven complexity. And developers today are just literally overwhelmed. What we see and part of this comes through the platform engineering movement where people want to consolidate things down into a platform engineering scope. But on top of that, they have to have a set of APIs that are consistent across their application developers. So what we see is this increasing decision of how do I have APIs that my developers have in the same way that Kubernetes brought a set of APIs for hosting and everyone could agree on for the hosting level. What are the APIs that everyone could agree about their application level? So if we can reduce the fragmentation of large numbers of frameworks but we can agree on a set of APIs around this all, all of a sudden developers from different languages and different frameworks can coordinate together. So that's what we're trying to do at Diagram. How is it we can reduce the boilerplate code, reduce the amount of patterns that you have to reinvent, constantly reinvent the wheel. And we do that because DAPRA's APIs that we host in our catalyst service in order for you to take away the grudgery of building code that spans across different teams and across different frameworks and different platforms. And we see a huge movement that was going to take, it's a democratization of building applications at scale. When we're talking about democratization, when we're talking about making life easier for developers, automation comes at play. And the next step of automation is generative AI, right? Everybody here, there are a lot of companies who are now offering products based on generative AI. So from Diagram's perspective, how do you look at gen AI? We don't have a lot of generative AI today but what we'll see emerging is that generative API will be used a lot in applications all the time now. We're seeing that people want to bring in different applications at genative AI. In fact, the general trend that we see is that people try to chat GPT first and then that's a choice that we use. Every app developer is looking at... Everyone is like that, yeah. And then what they're then going to do is they then try and move and test out on a few other models. So I think that you'll probably see us think about how we have a general purpose API that allows you to test and run lots of different models to optimize things against. And I think that's going to happen a lot where developers will be using generative AI in our applications but need to test on different models in some way. And I think we in Diagram will explore that space quite a bit of crossing the boundaries of developers building traditional applications but bringing generative AI in, whether it's in testing a model for some medical application or because they might want to generate some specific code inside their app. So I think there's a lot of exciting things that can happen here. Mark, thank you so much for sitting down with me and of course talk about the importance of app developer and also thanks for organizing this conference. Thanks for all those insights and I would love to chat with you again. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been wonderful to be here.