Microsoft has launched Radius, a language-agnostic collaboration app for creating and running cloud-native applications. Radius sprang from the Microsoft Azure Incubations team, whose projects include the development app Dapr, event-driven autoscaling solution KEDA, and the Copacetic security tool. Dapr and KEDA are among the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects. Microsoft submitted Copacetic to CNCF and plans to submit Radius, which standardizes deployment and automates resource provisioning through features like Recipes and Connections.

Radius is open source and multi-cloud, “allowing for applications that can be written once and deployed to any cloud or on-premises infrastructure using the same toolset and workflows.”

“Because the relationships between resources are inherently captured in application authoring and deployment activities, Radius enables a comprehensive view into an organization’s architecture via its application graph data,” Microsoft explains in a blog post.

Radius is “focused on solving platform engineering challenges involved in supporting application deployments across on-premises infrastructure and cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services,” as well as Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.

Radius offers built-in support for Dapr as well as infrastructure-as-code (IaC) languages like Terraform and Bicep.

“The overall idea here is that while Kubernetes has made it easier to build applications that can — at least in theory — run anywhere, those applications have become increasingly complex, making it harder to manage them,” writes TechCrunch, noting that “ideally,” an application platform like Radius “abstracts all of this away and lets developers focus on writing their applications.”

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich writes on the Azure blog that Radius, by default, “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.”

Accessible at radapp.io, Radius aims to provide the following benefits on release, writes InfoWorld:

• A simplified and consistent development experience, with the same application definition used to deploy to any cloud provider or on premises.
• Standardizing and scaling of deployments with a clear separation of concerns between developers and operators. Pre-definable templates automate the provisioning of infrastructure and environment configurations.
• An application graph that provides visibility into the resources and relationships that comprise an application.

“Radius itself is unopinionated about the way the app is written and it’s flexible enough to support your two-tier and three-tier applications, which there are a ton of them still being built in the enterprise,” Russinovich tells TechCrunch, adding that “they’re containerized now but they’re still that architecture. And it’s also able to support complex microservice-based applications with a dozen or two dozen microservices.”