Microsoft has just announced a new open source-based software platform that hopes to help developers and businesses create, deploy, and manage cloud-based applications. It"s called Radius, and it comes from the Microsoft Azure Incubations team.
In a blog post, Microsoft goes over the goals of Radius:
Designed to fit into, rather than disrupt, existing development tasks and CI/CD pipelines, Radius works to help developers better understand all the components that comprise their applications and takes care of platform configurations like permissions, connection strings, and more to simplify their tasks. As a result, operators can ensure that all applications are deployed in compliance with organizational policies, then use Radius to manage the application and its resources.
Microsoft offered up an example of how Radius will work with an app that uses a Mongo database:
With Radius, developers can model a Mongo resource in their app and use its connection string during their development and testing stages. When it comes time to deploy in production, developers can swap their application resources by changing just their app definition connections to services like Azure CosmosDB or AWS DocumentDB that have been pre-configured by operators. In other words, changing the backing infrastructure for an application in Radius no longer requires app code or configuration changes.
The first release of Radius will of course support Microsoft"s own Azure cloud platform, but will also support private clouds and Amazon Web Services. Support for additionalcloud services, including Google Cloud, will be added in future releases of Radius. Microsoft has worked with other companies like BlackRock, Comcast, and Millenium BCP to make sure that applications managed via Radius will work with any cloud service.
Microsoft has also set up a Radius GitHub page with code and documentation for developers and there"s even a Discord community channel already set up so Radius developers can communicate with each other on working with the new platform.