Microsoft introduces Azure Radius, an open source development platform for multi-cloud computing

Monterey, California: At the Linux Foundation Members Summit, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich unveiled the groundbreaking open source project, Radius. This cloud-native application platform enables developers and operators to define, deploy and collaborate cloud-native applications across public clouds and private infrastructures.

First of all, if you’re a serious enterprise user, you might be thinking, “That’s not RADIUS!” You are right. This is not. The Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol is commonly used in Microsoft software stacks to provide remote and cloud Active Directory (AD) services. Cloud native Radius has nothing to do with RADIUS.

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The new Radius aims to simplify development, management and operational barriers in the complex cloud-native computing landscape. As Russionvitch said, “Cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes have made it easy to build applications that can run anywhere.” In fact, as I have argued myself, Kubernetes is the foundation of hybrid clouds.

But, that is much easier said than done. You may have noticed that writing an application that runs on Azure and, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not at all simple.

As Russinovich explained, “While Kubernetes is a key enabler, we see many customers building abstractions on top of Kubernetes, which typically focus on computing to address their limitations: Kubernetes does not It lacks a formal definition of an application, mixes infrastructure and application concepts, and is very complex.” You can say it again!

So, as “developers inevitably find that their applications need much more than Kubernetes, including support for dependencies such as APIs, key-value stores, caches, and observability systems,” Microsoft introduced Radius. is to give them additional facilities. Tool.

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Russinovich added, “Radius meets application teams where they live with not just Kubernetes, but other popular infrastructure tools like Terraform and Bicep, and by integrating with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems ) available as GitHub Actions. Radius. It also supports multi-tiered web-plus-data for complex microservices applications such as eShop, a popular Microsoft microservices cloud reference application.”

But, and this is important, even though he mostly referred to Microsoft development tools and GitHub, Radius is not an Azure-only program. It is supposed to work on any cloud that uses Kubernetes. These days, that basically means all clouds.

He also noted that the modern shift from the typical two- or three-tier service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications we learned in college or on our own to microservices and cloud-based applications presents us with new challenges in terms of monitoring, management. And constant updates We are far from the past era of waterfall software development.

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Roussinovich added that troubleshooting is significantly more difficult with systems that are intertwined in applications. Furthermore, implementing best practices in these applications remains a challenge for many developers.

So, it can be done, but the process of creating and deploying apps has become a complicated exercise. Our code today is “tied together with baling wire and duct tape using Bash scripts and PowerShell,” Rosiewicz explained. “And so building an application has become just a jury-rigged kind of exercise.” “Not only that, but when you run the program, you can’t see anything about the relationship between the resources. Find the front end here, the back end there, and you just don’t understand what’s going on here.”

Radius is engineered to mitigate these challenges. For example, Russonvich said, “Radius automatically connects those components to their application, taking care of permissions, connection strings, and more.” It also ensures that the cloud infrastructure used by applications meets cost, operational and security requirements.

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All these requirements are included in the recipes. These connect an application to its dependent infrastructure, which enables it to provide an application graph. It shows exactly how the application and the infrastructure are related. Using them, your team can see and understand directly what makes up an application.

So, for example, you could have a recipe that calls a Redis cache, a MongoDB database, and Twilio API communication links. The magic part is that you can use the same recipe to deploy an application not just to one cloud, but to multiple different clouds at the same time. Therefore, you can build hybrid or multi-cloud applications much more easily. In Azure, the command calls the appropriate Azure resources, in AWS, AWS resources, etc.

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This is just not a good idea. In addition to Microsoft, companies such as BlackRock, Comcast and Millennium BCP are working together to ensure that Radius-defined and managed applications can run on any cloud.

Want to join and give it a try? Licensed under the Apache License, the Radius code is ready to be modified and run on GitHub. Radius isn’t ready for production loads yet, but the promise is great, and I’m excited to see what developers get out of it. This could be a real game changer for anyone developing or using hybrid/multi-cloud software.