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Microsoft today announced the launch of Radius, a new open-source, language-agnostic application platform for building and running cloud-native applications. The project is being spun off from the Microsoft Azure incubation team, the same group that previously created open-source projects like Dapr, a KEDA event-driven autoscaling solution for building microservices, and Copacetic, a security tool for patching container image vulnerabilities. Were launched. Dapper and KEDA are already part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects and Microsoft also recently introduced Copesitic. It is no surprise that the company is also planning to submit RADIUS for inclusion in CNCF within the next six months.
With Radius, developers will be able to deploy applications on private clouds, Microsoft’s own Azure, and Amazon’s AWS, with support for Google Cloud coming soon. The overall idea here is that while Kubernetes has made it easier to create applications that can – at least in theory – run anywhere, those applications have also become increasingly complex, making them harder to manage. Ideally, an application platform abstracts away all of this and lets developers focus on writing their applications.
Image Credit: Microsoft
We’ve seen other application platforms in the past that tried to abstract all the infrastructure away from developers, including the Cloud Foundry project and commercial services like VMware’s Tanju Application Service built around it. But as Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO and Microsoft technical fellow, told me, Radius is taking a decidedly different approach to solving this problem.
“One of the things we’re doing differently is that we want RADIUS to support all types of applications, rather than having a vertical view of the architecture of an application or only supporting a certain pattern of applications – like 12-factor – or requiring that the apps themselves be written a certain way. Radius itself is not unanimous about how to write apps and is flexible enough to support your two-tier and three-tier applications , a ton of which are still being built in the enterprise. They’re containerized now but they’re still the same architecture. And it’s also capable of supporting complex microservices-based applications with a dozen or two dozen microservices.
He also notes that rival platforms are very focused on describing the relationships between compute layers of applications or microservices, but they often leave the other cloud resources that make up modern applications as an external concern. “The goal with RADIUS was that, as a developer, I could completely describe my app — not just the compute parts but the resources that they use, like, hey, this front end and this back end. There is pubsub between end. And outside this microservice is a government store – and every cloud resource that exists can be described this way. So a complete application graph is what you end up getting. And as a developer you’re motivated to leverage RADIUS to describe those relationships because it does a lot of the work for you under the hood.
Microsoft notes that it designed Radius to meet developers where they are. For example, it doesn’t attempt to completely reinvent the infrastructure-as-code concept, and instead leverages existing tools like Terraform (or perhaps OpenTofu as long as it remains compatible) and Bicep. It also integrates with CI/CD services like GitHub Actions.
There’s also a universal control plane at the heart of RADIUS, which, it turns out, is based on the Azure Resource Manager deployment engine — the same deployment orchestrator the company uses to manage the deployment of applications in Azure. Russinovich told me the company will open source this resource manager within the next six months. He also noted that Bicep, the domain-specific infrastructure-as-code language that sits on top of the deployment engine, is already open source.
Microsoft has already partnered with Comcast and Portuguese bank Millennium BCP to enable Radius to work on any cloud.
In many ways, Microsoft is using the same overall playbook for RADIUS as it did for the Dapr distributed application runtime. It is launching the service as an open-source project and putting it under the governance of CNCF. Subsequently DPR also started some commercial activities around the project, including companies such as DiaGrid. We’ll likely see a similar trajectory for RADIUS — assuming it gains enough traction — and maybe Azure itself might one day offer a RADIUS-based application platform as well.
