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Radius feature roadmap update

By Will Tsai |

The Radius project maintainers would like to provide a progress update on our feature roadmap to share some of the features that have been released, what’s coming next, and how the community can help shape the future of Radius.

We invite the community to provide feedback on our priorities to jointly grow and enhance Radius. Please bookmark the Radius roadmap for updates on the full set of roadmap priorities.

To see video demos of the latest Radius features, visit the Radius YouTube channel

Recent progress

With early adopters of Radius being primarily platform engineers, GitOps support and the ability to create custom resource types are the two major feature requests. These have been part of the top priorities for Radius, with the recent release of Flux integration and custom resource types coming soon. In addition, Radius contributors have been hard at work in delivering other new features, including support for the Dapr Configuration building block. Other recent accomplishments include a new rad resource-type create CLI command that introduces foundational primitives for resource extensibility, while preparations for migrating to PostgreSQL lay the groundwork for further improvements to the Radius data store. These updates reflect the collaborative efforts of the Radius community to drive innovation and usability.

Support for GitOps using Flux

Radius now has integrated first-class support for Flux, a popular GitOps tool. Flux is designed to work with Kubernetes and provides a set of features for managing applications and infrastructure through Git. To learn more, visit the Radius and GitOps overview and how-to guide for Radius + Flux. You can also view a demo of the Flux features here.

Support for Dapr Configuration Building Block

A new Applications.Dapr/configurationStores resource type is now available to define and deploy the Dapr Configuration building block in Radius. The Dapr Configuration building block allows for dynamic configuration updates, including feature flag management, and is a great addition to the Dapr integration in Radius. To learn more, go to the Dapr Configuration Store resource schema in the Radius documentation. To see a demo of this feature, visit the Radius YouTube channel here.

rad CLI command for creating new resource types

We have added a CLI command rad resource-type create to create new resource-types in Radius. This was added to enable resource extensibility in Radius. The end-to-end functionality of creating and deploying a custom user-defined resource type will be available in a future release. To learn more about these efforts, see the resource types extensibility technical design document. For an early preview, check out the video demo for deploying custom resource types here.

Preparations for using PostgreSQL as the Radius database

In the near future, the Radius data store will be migrated from etcd to a PostgreSQL database. In preparation for this, the Helm chart for installing Radius now includes deploying PostgreSQL to the Kubernetes cluster. You can follow the progress of moving the Radius data store in this issue.

Upcoming priorities

Looking ahead, our feature focus will be on enhancing the extensibility of Radius, starting with the ability to create custom resource types and enabling compute platform portability into serverless container platforms. Scalability and operational improvements are also on the horizon, including control plane upgrades, support for external data stores, and ability to specify additional application configurations.

Custom resource types

Radius currently supports a set of built-in resource types that you can define and deploy in your Radius application. Through custom resource types, Radius will provide an extensibility model where the user can bring their own services or resources and integrate them with Radius. This will enable users to easily define and deploy their own resource types and leverage the other features of Radius such as Recipes and Application Graph to manage their complete suite of resources. Additionally, it will provide an avenue for the open-source community to publish custom resource types and Recipes as community supported assets.

Serverless container platforms

An important part of the Radius vision is to be not only cloud provider agnostic, but also container platform agnostic, and that includes the underlying compute such that Radius can deploy the same application across different compute platforms. Given the importance of serverless infrastructure in the modern application landscape, it is a priority for Radius to support serverless container platforms, in addition to Kubernetes, as the underlying compute platform. Our first foray into this space will be to build support for Azure Container Instances as a compute provider. We wanted our first expansion beyond Kubernetes to be into a less opinionated platform that provides raw compute primitives which allows us to better learn how to model the extensibility of Radius. Our learnings will hopefully pave the way for further expansion including AWS Elastic Container Service and Azure Container Apps in the future.

Control plane upgrades

Today, Radius does not have a safe mechanism for upgrading from one release to another. This enhancement provides users the ability to upgrade from an existing installation to a new release with safeguards in place like data backups, rolling upgrades to minimize downtime, and automatic rollback if something goes wrong with the upgrade. This is a critical feature for production deployments of Radius, and we are working to ensure that users can effortlessly upgrade their control plane installations without losing the stored state of their applications.

External data store

As mentioned above, preparations are underway for enabling the use of PostgreSQL as the Radius data store and implementation is ongoing. This will improve the resiliency of the Radius control plane and make upgrades easier. The technical design is here if you’d like to read about or contribute to this effort.

Additional application configurations

Incremental improvements to the application configuration experience in Radius are also in progress. These include the ability to specify application scaling behavior (such as custom metrics for scaling and setting maximum number of replicas) and the ability to configure HTTP timeouts for gateways. These are community-driven enhancements that will provide users with more control over their applications and improve the utility of Radius across a wider range of production scenarios.

Learn more and contribute

All feedback and contributions are welcome! The community is encouraged to engage with the Radius project in the following ways: