Microsoft Announces a New Open App Platform for the Cloud

Microsoft Radius is a new open-source, cloud-native application platform from Azure Incubations that supports Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and private clouds.

“Radius enables developers and platform engineers who support them to collaborate on delivering and managing cloud-native applications that follow corporate best practices for cost, operations, and security by default,” Azure CTO Mark Russinovich explains in the announcement post. “Radius is an open-source project that supports deploying applications across private cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services, with more cloud providers to come.”

Radius seeks to address the growing complexity of managing cloud-based applications that rely on multiple, interconnected services and are deployed to both public and private clouds. It also tries to solve the limitations of Kubernetes, which makes it easy to build apps that can run anywhere but doesn’t define what an application is and commingles it with infrastructure. And of course, corporate IT also needs to deal with an ever-growing set of internal standards, compliance, and security requirements.

“Radius was designed to address these distinct but related challenges,” Russinovich continues. “Radius meets application teams where they are by supporting proven technologies like Kubernetes, existing infrastructure tools including Terraform and Bicep, and by integrating with existing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems like GitHub Actions. Radius supports multi-tier web-plus-data to complex microservice applications like eShop, a popular cloud reference application from Microsoft.”

Microsoft worked with BlackRock, Comcast, and Millenium BCP on defining exactly what these open, cloud-agnostic applications look like. And because Radius is open-source, anyone can contribute, helping it evolve as cloud standards evolve.

You can learn more at the Microsoft Open Source Blog, the Radius project on GitHub, the Radius website, and the Radius documentation site.