Monterrey, California: At the Linux Foundation Members Summit, Microsoft Azure’s CTO, Mark Russinovich, unveiled a groundbreaking open-source project, Radius. This cloud-native, application platform will enable developers and operators to define, deploy, and collaborate on cloud-native applications across public clouds and private infrastructure.
First things first, if you’re a serious enterprise user, you might be thinking: “That’s not RADIUS!” You’re right. It’s not. The Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol is commonly used in Microsoft software stacks to deliver remote and cloud Active Directory (AD) services. The cloud-native Radius has nothing to do with RADIUS.
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The new Radius aims to simplify the development, management, and operational hurdles in cloud-native computing’s complex landscape. As Russionvitch said, “Cloud native technologies like Kubernetes have made building applications that can run anywhere easier.” Indeed, as I’ve argued myself, Kubernetes is the foundation for hybrid clouds.
But, that’s much easier to say than to do. You may have noticed it’s not simple at all to write an application that will run the same on Azure and, say, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
As Russinovich explained, “While Kubernetes is a key enabler, we see many customers building abstractions over Kubernetes, usually focused on compute, to work around its limitations: Kubernetes has no formal definition of an application, it mingles infrastructure and application concepts, and it is overwhelmingly complex.” You can say that again!
So, as “developers inevitably realize their applications require much more than Kubernetes, including support for dependencies like application programming interface (API) front ends, key-value stores, caches, and observability systems,” Microsoft has introduced Radius to give them the additional tools.
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Russinovich added, “Radius meets application teams where they live by supporting not just Kubernetes, but other popular infrastructure tools such as Terraform and Bicep, and by integrating with existing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems such as GitHub Actions. Radius also…