Catalyst hosting options
Catalyst is an application orchestration platform built on top of the Dapr open-source project that can be hosted by Diagrid or run on a self-managed Kubernetes cluster. Catalyst centralizes the Dapr runtime in a Diagrid-operated or customer-operated Kubernetes cluster, where the Dapr control plane and sidecars are managed as part of the Catalyst platform. Your applications connect to the Catalyst control plane, which handles workflow execution, state management, distributed application coordination, and more.
System topology
There are two major components of the Catalyst system that work together to enable the authoring and executing of distributed applications:
Dapr SDKs
The Dapr software development kits (SDKs) are available in various languages and can be integrated as a dependency into your new or existing application. They offer developers a comprehensive development framework and APIs, facilitating the creation and management of distributed applications using Dapr building blocks.
Catalyst Platform
Built on the open source Dapr runtime, Catalyst provides a centralized Dapr runtime that your applications connect to using Dapr SDKs. Operating independently from your application hosting environment, Catalyst oversees the execution process by preserving the source of truth for your workflow execution histories, state management, and distributed application coordination.
Your applications use standard Dapr SDKs to communicate with Catalyst's hosted Dapr runtime, which ensures the durable execution of your distributed applications and services.
Catalyst has multiple hosting options:
☁️Catalyst Cloud
Fully managed SaaS with the entire platform hosted by Diagrid
🔒Catalyst Enterprise
Dedicated Catalyst environment with deployment options for the data plane, including Diagrid-managed, self-hosted, and air-gapped deployments
Regions and projects
Catalyst offers multiple layers of logical isolation to help you organize and manage your applications.
- Regions: The highest level of isolation, which provides a completely isolated instance of the Catalyst data plane and Dapr runtime. Each Region includes its own Dapr control plane and set of resources, and can be used to isolate different environments (e.g., dev, staging, prod), different teams or business units, or different applications with strict isolation requirements. A Region is deployed on its own Kubernetes cluster and contains configuration for a set of Projects.
- Projects: Within each Region, you can create multiple Projects to further isolate applications, workflows, and agents. Projects provide a convenient way to group related applications and manage access controls, resources, and configurations at a more granular level. A Project designates its own namespace in Kubernetes and by default allows communication between all applications and infrastructure resources.