Monterey, California: A Linux Foundation Members Conference, Microsoft AzureIts CTO, Mark Rusinovich, unveiled a groundbreaking open source project, the radius. This cloud-native, application platform will enable developers and operators to define, deploy and collaborate on cloud-native applications across public cloud and private infrastructure.
First things first, if you’re a serious enterprise user, you might be thinking: “That’s not RADIUS!” You are right. It doesn’t. The Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol It is commonly used in Microsoft software stacks to provide remote and cloud Active Directory (AD) services. RADIUS has nothing to do with cloud-native radius.
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The new Radius aims to ease the development, management and operational hurdles of the complex landscape of cloud-native computing. As Rashanevich says, “Cloud native technologies like Kubernetes have made building applications that can easily run anywhere.” Indeed, as I have argued myself, Kubernetes is the foundation of hybrid clouds.
But, this is easier said than done. You may have noticed that writing an application that will do the same thing on Azure and, say, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not easy at all.
As Russinovich explains, “Although Kubernetes is a key enabler, we find that many customers are creating abstractions over Kubernetes, typically focused on compute, around its limitations: Kubernetes has no formal definition of an application, mixing infrastructure and application concepts. , and it’s extremely complex.” You can say that again!
So, as “developers inevitably realize that their applications need much more than Kubernetes, including support for dependencies such as Application Programming Interface (API) front ends, key-value stores, caches, and observability systems,” Microsoft is giving them extra. Radius launched. tools. tools.
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Russinovich added, “Radius meets the application team where they support and integrate with existing, not just Kubernetes, but other popular infrastructure tools such as Terraform and Bicep. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) system eg GitHub Actions. Radius supports multi-tier web-plus-data like complex microservices applications eShopA popular Microsoft microservices cloud reference application.”
But, and this is the important bit, even though he mostly mentions Microsoft and GitHub development tools, Radius is not an Azure-only program. It is meant to work on any cloud that uses Kubernetes. These days, that basically means all cloud.
He also noted that the modern shift from the traditional two- or three-tier service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications we learned in college or on our own to microservices and cloud-native-based applications is presenting us with new challenges in monitoring, managing. And constantly updated. We are far from the bygone era of waterfall software development.
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Roussinovich added that troubleshooting problems with interconnected systems within applications is significantly more difficult. Furthermore, applying best practices within these applications remains a struggle for many developers.
So, it can be done, but the process of creating and deploying the application has become a cumbersome exercise. Rusiovich explains that today, our code is “tied together with baling wire and duct tape using Bash and PowerShell scripts. And so, building an application has become a jury-rigged kind of exercise. Not only that, but once you deploy the application, you You can’t see anything about the relationship between resources. Find the front end here, find the back end there, and you don’t understand what’s going on here.”
Radius is engineered to alleviate these challenges. For example, Rusnovich says, “Radius automatically connects those components to their application by taking care of permissions, connection strings, and more.” It ensures that the cloud infrastructure used by the application meets cost, operation and security requirements.
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All these requirements are captured recipe. They bind an application to its dependent infrastructure, enabling it to provide a Application graph. It shows exactly how applications and infrastructure are interconnected. With these, your team can see and intuitively understand what makes an application.
So, for example, you might have a recipe that calls a Redis Cache, a MongoDB database, and Twilio API communication link. The magic part is that you can deploy an application not just to one cloud but to multiple different clouds at once using a recipe. So, you can build or hybrid multi-cloud The application is very easy. In Azure, the recipe will call the appropriate Azure resource, 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 Radius defines and manages applications that can run on any cloud.
Want to join and try it? Radius code, which is licensed under the Apache License Changed and ready to run on GitHub. Radius isn’t ready for production workloads yet, but its promise is great, and I’m excited to see what developers make of it. This could be a real game changer for anyone developing or using hybrid/multi-cloud software.