Microsoft Radius: “Kubernetes has made things more difficult”

The Microsoft Azure Incubations team has launched a new open source platform they call radius, which will facilitate the delivery and operation of applications across various cloud services and private infrastructure. Reports Development category.

– Although improvements in cloud infrastructure and platforms like Kubernetes have been essential for developing flexible, scalable, and portable microservices applications, they have also been more difficult For developers and those who will work on solutions, those who maintain the Radius project write in Blog post.

– Developers and operators have difficulty understanding how to package their applications across different tools.

For example, they state that developers find managing infrastructure to be too complex, and that the lack of visibility into the resources that make up their applications impacts productivity.

Works with all clouds

According to the launch blog post, Radius will provide developers and operators with a single tool to do just that Describe, Subtract And Manages The entire application.

Although Microsoft stands behind Radius, part of the point of Radius is that the solution should work with it everyone Clouds and don’t lock you into specific platforms.

Initially, it is true that only Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are supported, but more will be added in time.

There is support for many of the most popular application development tools such as Dapr and infrastructure-as-code languages ​​such as Terraform and Bicep. Radius can be integrated with existing continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) solutions, such as GitHub Actions.

According to Radius, developers will be able to define applications and dependencies in applications, without caring about the underlying infrastructure. Operators will then select and configure the platform, infrastructure and policies.

Beam recipes

The first version of Radius contains, among other things:

• Streamlined and consistent application development by being able to roll them out to any cloud provider or on-premises with the same application definition and same tools.
• “Radius Recipes,” pre-defined templates that automate infrastructure resource provisioning and environment configurations.
• Application diagrams should provide insight into all the resources and relationships that make up the application. As Radius says: Charts are better than lists. Charts can be used to present the application and understand it better.

– Radius enables developers to understand their applications, and knows that the application is more than just Kubernetes, explains Mark Russinovich from the Microsoft Azure team in an article Blog post.

According to Rusinovich, Radius will help developers know what components make up an app, and when they add new components, Radius will automatically “bind” those components to the app by taking care of necessary permissions and other things.

Written on the go

DevClass wrote that the core of Radius is the so-called Universal Control Platform (UCP), which according to documents It’s based on the design principles of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) – but rewritten to work across different clouds and systems.

The UCP must be completely new code written in Go.

As mentioned earlier, the source code for Radius is open source (Apache 2.0 License), and is located at github.