helayoty
commented
1 year ago Hello, @jonvsm and all Radius maintainers,
As part of CNCF TAG Runtime, I am reaching out to you to present/discuss Radius at one of our meetings since you have applied for Sandbox.
It would be great to learn about the roadmap of the project, tech, community, and the general overview.
If you are interested, there is a slot on November 2nd on our agenda. Please feel free to add it to the agenda or reach out to us in the #tag-runtime channel on the CNCF slack.
Thanks!
cc: @raravena80 @rajaskakodkar @nikhita
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Application contact emails
rynowak@microsoft.com, aaron.crawfis@microsoft.com, jonsmit@microsoft.com, ryanwaite@microsoft.com
Project Summary
Radius is an open-source, cloud-native application platform for cloud and on-premises environments.
Project Description
Radius is a cloud-native application platform that helps developers, and the platform engineers that support them, to collaborate on delivering and managing cloud-native applications that follow organizational best practices for cost, operations, and security, by default. Radius supports deploying applications across private cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services, with more cloud providers to come.
Org repo URL (provide if all repos under the org are in scope of the application)
https://github.com/radius-project
Project repo URL in scope of application
https://github.com/radius-project/radius
Additional repos in scope of the application
https://github.com/radius-project/docs https://github.com/radius-project/recipes
Website URL
https://radapp.io
Roadmap
https://github.com/orgs/radius-project/projects/8/views/1
Roadmap context
See this blog post for Radius Roadmap context Introducing the Radius feature roadmap | Radius Blog (radapp.io). Note that Radius maintainers review and refine the roadmap monthly, based on community feedback.
Contributing Guide
https://github.com/radius-project/radius/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
Code of Conduct (CoC)
https://github.com/radius-project/radius/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
Adopters
No response
Contributing or Sponsoring Org
Microsoft
Maintainers file
https://github.com/radius-project/community/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md
IP Policy
Trademark and accounts
Why CNCF?
The CNCF has sponsored multiple projects that are complimentary to Radius, per the integration discussion below. As a result, we see the CNCF community as critical to the future evolution, adoption and usage of Radius, including encouraging third-party contributions and extensions.
Benefit to the Landscape
Per the details below, Radius solves a common set of challenges related to cloud-native application delivery that many at-scale platform engineering teams are beginning to tackle via proprietary, in-house solutions. By donating Radius as an open-source project, the community can collectively deliver a single solution that will serve the ecosystem at large.
The evolution of cloud computing has increased the speed of innovation for many organizations, whether they are building second and third-tier applications or complex microservice-based applications. Cloud native technologies like Kubernetes have made building applications that can run anywhere easier. At the same time, many applications have become more complex, and managing them in the cloud is increasingly difficult, as companies build cloud-native applications composed of interconnected services and deploy them to multiple public clouds and their private infrastructure. While Kubernetes is a key enabler, we see many users 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. Developers also 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. Amidst these challenges for developers, their corporate IT counterparts also must enforce an ever-growing matrix of corporate standards, compliance, and security requirements, while still enabling rapid application innovation.
Many enterprise platform engineering teams across the industry prefer to contribute to an open source project to address these challenges, rather than building and maintaining their own proprietary solutions. Many of those same enterprises are multi-cloud and require solutions that work well on any public cloud as well as on-premises. So, Radius is open-source and multi-cloud from the start. It was designed to address the distinct but related challenges that arise across development and operations as companies continue their journey to the cloud. 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.
Cloud Native 'Fit'
Radius fits within the “Application Definition & Image Build” section of the CNCF landscape.
Cloud Native 'Integration'
Radius complements and can be composed with multiple existing CNCF projects, including but not limited to Kubernetes, Ingress controllers, cert-manager, CSI-Drivers, cloud vendor IAM technologies, KEDA, Dapr and Crossplane. Our goal is not to replace these technologies but to make their use simpler.
Radius applications are deployed to Radius environments which run on a Kubernetes cluster. This can be done using Kubernetes YAML or Helm Charts. This can also be done using our abstraction-layer/API from a tool like Bicep.
KEDA enables auto-scaling of Radius applications.
Dapr helps developers write microservices with best practices, abstraction, and portability. Radius does the same for defining application architecture. Radius and Dapr strongly complement each other: Radius works with Dapr, simplifying Dapr configuration. Together, they enable, not just portable code, but portable applications.
Radius is not opinionated about Infrastructure as Code technologies and currently supports both Bicep and Terraform IaC languages. Based on community interest we will support additional integrations such as Helm, Pulumi or Crossplane for resource management.
Cloud Native Overlap
We do not see significant overlap with other CNCF projects. While some may perceive overlap between Crossplane and Radius, the two are complementary and can be integrated to work together per comments above. Infrastructure as code tools are usually unopinionated and work by calling cloud resource management APIs with a low-to-medium level of abstraction. These tools are primarily targeted at platform engineers and operations experts.
Our focus in Radius is enabling developer productivity for application deployment and management through a high-level-of-abstraction self-service workflow based around our concepts of Recipes and Environments. Recipes could be implemented using a variety of infrastructure as code tools, and build upon the support that has already been embraced by the operations community.
The following areas are out of scope for Radius and users should use existing technologies:
Similar projects
Radius and the Open Application Model (OAM) share several concepts regarding how to define a cloud native application. OAM, however, is a specification whereas Radius is an actual implementation of a cloud native application platform. OAM has relatively hard dependencies on Kubernetes. In contrast, Radius supports Kubernetes today but was designed from the ground up to support a range of future runtimes, such as serverless, as they inevitably evolve over time.
Landscape
No
Business Product or Service to Project separation
There is currently no hosted product or service based on this project. Radius is only an open-source project offering self-hosted environments.
Project presentations
This video captures a recent presentation of Radius: https://youtu.be/8DdLzNfefxY
Also see this Linux Foundation Members Summit keynote: https://www.youtube.com/live/kuRyYJaXThY?feature=share
Project champions
Lachie Evenson (Microsoft), Chris Aniszczyk (CNCF), Melissa Smolensky (CNCF)
Additional information
As an addendum to the initial submission, here’s an update on Radius Community engagement efforts as of 3/13/2024.
The Radius team announced the open-sourcing of Radius at the Linux Foundation Member Summit on in October 2023, the day after this Sandbox submission. Since then, the team has been very focused on community engagement. To that end, we have the following in place.
Discord - We provide support to the Radius Community via this Discord Server. We have ~728 members @Discord. Users have engaged in Discord channels with questions regarding Radius concepts, how Radius relates to other technologies, troubleshooting assistance as well as advice on how to apply Radius in specific enterprise scenarios. Feedback on Radius features and bugs are added to the Radius repositories which are triaged twice weekly by the Radius triage team and the feedback regarding documentation gaps are captured in our docs board which is prioritized in the weekly doc reviews.
GitHub - Community members can submit Issues and PRs at http://github.com/radius-project. The main Radius repository has received ~1300 GitHub stars. We have a total of ~70 community contributors who have made over ~300 contributions to Radius, for both code and document changes. (Note these contributions are measured by CNCF standards and include the following GitHub events: PR open/close and reviews, issue open/close, comments on PRs/issues and commits.) Community members have fixed ~7 good-first issues, which involved resolving bugs and adding Radius features.
Website - Since open-sourcing Radius, ~32k unique users have visited the Radius website (radapp.io) and ~24k unique users have visited the docs website (docs.radapp.io)
Weekly Radius “Office Hours” – anyone in the community interested in engaging the Radius team directly on specific questions can schedule a 15min “Office Hours” session on Wednesday of any given week.
Monthly Community Call - Radius releases every month. After each monthly release we hold a community call open to anyone interested in learning the latest about Radius and demoing work with are doing with Radius and contributions to Radius.
Please join us on Discord, GitHub, Office Hours and the Monthly Community Calls!