Episode 161: Aaron Crawfis on Dapr and Sustaining Cloud OSS

Guest Aaron Crawfis Panelists Richard Littauer | Justin Dorfman Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Richard and Justin are excited to have as their guest today, Aaron Crawfis, who works in the cloud space as a Senior Product Manager on the Azure Open Source Incubations team, which develops and launches new open source projects to advance the industry of cloud native computing and applications. He’s done a lot of work on Dapr, which is a distributed application runtime where he helped define, launch, and market it to microservice developers currently working on incubations, and more open source stuff across Azure and Microsoft. Today, we’re going to find out more about Dapr, Azure, and working in the cloud space. Aaron tells us about some great projects and cool technologies coming out of the incubation space at Azure, and he shares some awesome advice if you’re a project looking to get into this space. Press download to hear more! [00:01:52] We start with learning more about Dapr. [00:04:39] What’s the difference between cloud native and working in the cloud? [00:07:35] Justin mentions Dapr is mature and there are several companies that use it and wonders what’s keeping Dapr in an incubation state rather than graduating. Aaron also tells us that since the release of Dapr v.1.10, they found that the majority of contributors are now non-Microsoft developers. [00:09:31] We hear if Sarah Novotny and Stormy Peters are involved in Dapr or if they’ve worked on any projects with Aaron. [00:11:59] Aaron gives us his take on why so many people in the cloud space feel the need to gravitate towards large corporations. [00:16:33] We hear about a small business startup Diagrid, and the Founders are building their entire business model around Dapr. [00:18:13] Besides wearing a Dapr hat, Aaron runs the Open Source Incubations at Azure, so he fills us in on what that is, and their most recent incubation they launched called, Project Copacetic. Ju