The Future of Cloud-Native Application Development with Radius - Loek Duys - NDC Oslo 2024

Radius is an open-source CNCF sandbox project that helps deploy cloud-native applications by reducing cognitive load for product teams

Key components of Radius:

• Application models define the structure and dependencies
• Recipes are reusable infrastructure templates
• Environments manage lifecycle stages (dev, test, prod)
• Workspaces connect resource groups to clusters
• Built-in support for Dapr components and abstractions

Radius enables:

• Quick paths to production deployments
• Team isolation through resource groups
• Infrastructure management across multiple clouds
• Abstraction of deployment complexity
• Collaboration between dev and ops teams

The platform runs on Kubernetes and can:

• Manage cloud resources (Azure, AWS, etc.)
• Handle state storage and messaging
• Provide networking and security features
• Support multiple environments simultaneously
• Integrate with observability tools

Developer experience features:

• CLI tools for deployment and management
• Local development support
• Environment variable injection
• Port forwarding capabilities
• Dashboard for monitoring and debugging

Production-ready capabilities:

• TLS/security management
• State store implementations (MongoDB, Cosmos DB)
• Messaging systems (Redis, Service Bus)
• Gateway/routing configuration
• Multi-environment support

The platform facilitates DevOps collaboration by:

• Providing common tooling and abstractions
• Enabling self-service for product teams
• Managing infrastructure lifecycle
• Supporting multiple deployment targets
• Standardizing deployment patterns