Microsoft announced a new open source-based software platform aimed at helping developers and businesses create, deploy, and manage cloud-based applications. It’s called Radius and was created by the Microsoft Azure Incubations team.
Microsoft describes Radius’ goals in a blog post:
Radius is designed to fit into, rather than disrupt, existing development tasks and CI/CD pipelines, helping developers gain a deeper understanding of all the components that make up an application. Handles platform configuration such as permissions and connection strings to simplify tasks. . As a result, operators can ensure that all applications are deployed according to organizational policies and use Radius to manage applications and their resources.
Microsoft provided an example of how Radius works in an app that uses a Mongo database.
Radius allows developers to model Mongo resources within their apps and use the connection strings during development and testing. When it comes time to deploy to production, developers can replace application resources by changing only the app-defined connections to services such as Azure CosmosDB and AWS DocumentDB that are preconfigured by the operator. This means that when you change your application’s backing infrastructure with Radius, no app code or configuration changes are required.
The first release of Radius will of course support Microsoft’s own Azure cloud platform, but it will also support private clouds and Amazon Web Services. Support for additional cloud services, including Google Cloud, will be added in future releases of Radius. Microsoft has been cooperating in the past. Other companies such as BlackRock, Comcast, and Millenium BCP ensure that applications managed through Radius work with any cloud service.
Microsoft has also set up a Radius GitHub page with code and documentation for developers, and a Discord community channel has already been set up for Radius developers to communicate with each other about their work on the new platform.