Radius is a cloud-native application platform that the Microsoft Azure Incubations team is proud to introduce. It enables developers and the platform engineers who support them to work together on delivering and managing cloud-native applications that by default adhere to corporate best practices for cost, operations, and security. With additional cloud providers on the way, Radius is an open-source project that allows delivering apps across private clouds, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft uses open source software to innovate
The Azure Incubations team at Microsoft is especially committed to open-source innovation that enables everyone to hasten their journey to the cloud. Microsoft is a significant contributor to open-source projects throughout the industry. The Radius team has also released several well-known open source projects, such as Dapr, KEDA, and Copacetic, which are all accessible at github.com under the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF).
Building complicated microservice-based apps or second- and third-tier applications, cloud computing’s growth has sped up innovation for many businesses. Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies have made it simpler to create mobile applications. As businesses create cloud-native apps made up of connected services and deploy them to various public clouds as well as their own private infrastructure, many applications have grown more complicated and are more challenging to manage on the cloud.
Even though Kubernetes is a significant enabler, several customers are developing abstractions atop it, typically with a compute-centric focus, to get around its limitations: Kubernetes is extremely sophisticated, blends infrastructure and application concepts, and lacks a defined definition of an application.
Additionally, developers inevitably come to the realization that their applications need support for dependencies like application programming interface (API) front ends, key-value stores, caches, and observability systems, in addition to Kubernetes. In addition to these difficulties faced by developers, corporate IT departments also face the task of enforcing an expanding matrix of corporate standards, compliance, and security requirements while fostering rapid application innovation.
Presenting Radius
As businesses continue their migration to the cloud, Radius was created to solve these many but linked difficulties that come up across operations and development. By supporting established infrastructure tools like Terraform and Bicep, as well as interfacing with current continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solutions like GitHub Actions, Radius meets application teams where they are. Radius supports complicated microservice applications like Microsoft’s eShop, a well-known multi-tier web-plus-data application.
Radius gives developers the ability to comprehend their applications and is aware that applications go beyond Kubernetes. When developers add new components, Radius automatically links those components to their applications by taking care of permissions, connection strings, and other issues. Radius enables developers see all the components that make up their application.
Additionally, Radius makes ensuring that applications’ cloud infrastructure complies with cost, operation, and security standards. These specifications are written down in recipes that are created by the platform engineers, security engineers, and/or IT operators who support cloud native developers. Radius ties an application to the infrastructure that it depends on, allowing Radius to produce an application graph that demonstrates the precise connections between the application and infrastructure. Team members can see and understand the components of an application thanks to this graph.
Many businesses use several clouds and need solutions that function well not only on Azure but also on other clouds and on-premises. Radius is therefore multi-cloud and open-source from the beginning. As a result of collaboration between businesses including Microsoft, BlackRock, Comcast, and Millenium BCP, applications defined and managed with Radius can now run on any cloud.
Radius is available to contributions from anyone in the open-source community, ensuring that Radius develops alongside the larger cloud native community. Initial findings from these businesses include:The application development lifecycle must be streamlined given the constantly changing cloud environment of today. The Microsoft Azure internal developers must be able to quickly access the infrastructure they need while also abiding by compliance norms and specifications. In this situation, Radius strikes us as a promising enabler.
The platform gives developers access to crucial cloud resources like Kubernetes and storage options through its distinctive supply of Radius recipes without the need to fully understand these underlying systems’ intricate workings. The Microsoft Azure involvement with Radius is a result of our support for open-source software within our own Aladdin technology platform, and we think this strategy has a great deal of potential to connect with the cloud native community. Senior Principal Engineer and OSPO Director at BlackRock, Mike Bowen.
“At Millennium bcp, Microsoft Azure place a high priority on security, compliance, best practices, and agility, and they must make sure that these demands are consistently satisfied. They are striving to establish standard Application definitions and lifecycles first-class citizens in our IT environment while abstracting internal proprietary IT patterns and service contracts in order to unify expectations and lifecycles across numerous teams and technologies. This identical vision may be found in Radius.
In order to abstract complexity and guarantee that design decisions are taken by the appropriate people, Microsoft Azure infrastructure may be completely managed by internal infra product teams, who just expose the Recipe to our developers. Without having to think about implementation issues, developers may concentrate on determining what is pertinent for their Applications and utilizing the appropriate Recipes. This shared contract refocuses teams in the right way: developers concentrate solely on improving the application, while infrastructure teams are now able to maintain the infrastructure with a clear understanding of how the application depends on it. Nuno Guedes, Millennium BCP’s Cloud Compute Lead
The Microsoft Azure Incubations Team used Dapr to assist developers in writing microservices that adhered to standard principles, were abstract, portable, and were not dependent on infrastructure. They are currently defining the architecture of an application in the similar way. Radius integrates with Dapr, which simplifies Dapr configuration, making the two technologies a powerful combination. Together, they make it possible for portable programs as well as portable code.
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