Posts on Radius Blog

Radius Community Update: June 2026

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0700

Welcome to the June 2026 Radius community update! Radius is an open-source cloud-native application platform that helps developers define, deploy, and manage applications across any cloud or on-premises environment. It acts as an abstraction layer between your application and your infrastructure, letting you focus on building your app while platform teams keep control over how resources are provisioned.

This month delivered the v0.59.0 release, which continues the journey toward extensible compute platforms with the new Radius.Core Resource Types. The release adds more CLI support for the preview resource model, automatic Gateway setup for route Recipes, and several bug fixes. Looking ahead, the next release will include early work on multi-cluster deployments, simpler Resource Type schemas, and a new set of contributor guides.

Radius Community Update: May 2026

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0800

Welcome to the May 2026 Radius community update! Radius is an open-source cloud-native application platform that helps developers define, deploy, and manage applications across any cloud or on-premises environment. It acts as an abstraction layer between your application and your infrastructure, letting you focus on building your app while platform teams maintain control over how resources are provisioned.

This month brought two releases, a streamlined getting-started experience, early CLI support for the next-generation Radius.Core resource types, and automated resource type registration on install.

How I Built a Radius Plugin for Headlamp

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0800

Hi, I’m Filipe Revez, and I work at Millennium bcp, Portugal’s largest privately owned bank. As some of you may know, Millennium bcp has been an early adopter of Radius — we wrote about our journey in a case study back in 2023, where we shared how we use Radius to go from 8 days to 8 minutes when deploying applications across environments. We also have a few engineers that actively contribute to the Radius ecosystem. Radius has become a key part of the platform we’ve built for our development teams, enabling them to focus on their applications while our infrastructure teams manage the underlying resources through Recipes and Environments.

Announcing Radius v0.54

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Radius v0.54. This update brings several improvements and fixes detailed below. You can find the full release notes on our GitHub releases page.

If you’re new to Radius, it’s a cloud-native application platform designed to simplify the deployment and management of Applications. To get started, visit our getting started guide and learn how to install Radius and create your first app.

Fixed `rad workspace show` errors when no current workspace exists

The rad workspace show command has been updated to improve usability. Previously, if no workspace was set, the command would return an error, which could be confusing. With this release, the command now logs an informational message to guide you when no current workspace exists. This change ensures a more user-friendly experience when managing workspaces. For more details, refer to the CLI documentation.

Deploy a RAG chatbot app using Radius

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 08:00:00 -0800

Agentic AI applications are rapidly becoming a cornerstone of modern software, enabling systems to reason, act, and interact with data in unprecedented ways. As these intelligent applications grow in complexity, managing their infrastructure and governance becomes increasingly challenging. For instance, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot application might require a combination of vector databases, large language models (LLMs), and traditional compute, on top of which considerations like dependency management, security, and compliance are layered. Indeed, when looking at some of the most popular AI sample applications, we see that they often involve multiple components and services that need to be orchestrated outside the bounds of the core application itself before the application can even run.

Announcing Radius v0.53.0

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 04:12:56 +0000

Radius v0.53.0 is here! This latest release brings exciting updates to improve your experience with Radius, whether you’re deploying cloud-native Applications or managing internal developer platforms. You can explore the full release notes at Radius v0.53.0 Release Notes. If you’re new to Radius, visit radapp.io to learn more about the platform and check out the getting started guide to install Radius and create your first app.

Contour ingress controller installation re-enabled

Radius v0.53.0 reintroduces support for installing the Contour ingress controller during rad install kubernetes or rad init. This enhancement is made possible by the availability of the Contour Helm Charts. With this update, you no longer need to manually install and configure a Contour ingress controller before deploying Gateway resources. This streamlines the setup process and ensures a smoother deployment experience for your Applications.

Happy 2nd birthday, Radius!

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On October 18, 2025 we celebrated two years since Radius was released as an open-source project! This milestone gives us a chance to reflect on our collective journey and the significant progress made with the community. This past year has been transformative for Radius, with a focus on providing an extensibility model for enterprises adopting Radius into their internal developer platforms and adding capabilities that improved operational maturity of the platform.

Announcing Radius v0.52.0

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:29:59 +0000

Today marks the release of Radius v0.52.0, bringing usability improvements and refinements to enhance your experience with the Radius platform. This release focuses on making key commands more intuitive and user-friendly, while also addressing several important updates under the hood. You can find the full release notes on the Radius GitHub repository.

If you’re new to Radius, it’s an open-source platform for building, deploying, and managing cloud-native applications. To get started, visit the Radius website for an overview, or check out the getting started guide to install Radius and create your first app.

Announcing Radius v0.51.0

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Radius v0.51.0! This update introduces several enhancements to improve usability, streamline workflows, and address key user concerns. Whether you’re a developer or platform engineer, this release brings meaningful updates to help you manage your cloud-native Applications more effectively. You can find the full release notes here.

If you’re new to Radius, visit radapp.io to learn more about the platform and its capabilities. To get started, check out the getting started guide for step-by-step instructions on installing Radius and deploying your first application.

Announcing Radius v0.50.0

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks an exciting milestone for the Radius community with the release of Radius v0.50.0. This release introduces several significant enhancements designed to improve your experience as a developer or platform engineer. Whether you’re upgrading an existing installation or exploring Radius for the first time, this release has something for everyone. You can find the full release notes here. If you’re new to Radius, visit our getting started guide to learn how to install Radius and create your first app.

In-place upgrades now available

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Up until now, upgrading a Radius installation meant manually redeploying the control plane. This was cumbersome and risked downtime for your internal platform. Beginning with Radius v0.50, we’re excited to announce support for in-place upgrades of the Radius control plane. Using the new rad upgrade command, platform engineers can now upgrade a running Radius control plane to a new version without rebuilding their Environments or disrupting running applications. This enhancement makes it much easier to keep up with new Radius releases in production, thanks to built-in safety checks and a rollback capability.

Contribute Your First Resource Type and Recipe

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Radius helps platform engineers build powerful Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) with curated resource catalogs that empower developers to build applications that adhere to all enterprise best practices. Key to delivering custom resource catalogs is the Radius Resource Types feature.

Think of Radius Resource Types as the developer’s interface to your platform. They define a contract—a set of properties developers use to provision infrastructure without needing to know the implementation details. Platform engineers then create Recipes—the implementation of that contract—using tools like Terraform or Bicep to deploy and manage the actual cloud resources, ensuring that best practices related to security, compliance, and cost are followed by default.

Future Proofing AI Applications via Radius Resource Types

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Building Applications in the AI Era

Imagine you’re an enterprise developer building your first AI-powered application. You start with Anthropic’s Claude, ramp on the APIs, write your application code, configure authentication, test the application and successfully deploy it to production. Everything is working great but, three months later, your organization migrates to an entirely different AI model, such as Google Gemini, for better results or for cost optimization. Suddenly, you’re facing days or weeks of refactoring and testing across environments before redeploying the same application using the different model.

Introducing Radius Resource Types

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Radius maintainers and community have been hard at work enabling platform engineers to build internal developer platforms that are application-centric with a great developer experience. This week Radius launched Radius Resource Types, reinforcing its core mission to decouple application definitions from underlying infrastructure.

Enterprises integrating Radius into their internal developer platform tell us they need to customize the API for common resource types such as a PostgreSQL database to simplify the developer experience (allowing developers to select T-shirt sizes, for example). Others want to create abstract resource types such as a web service that may have a reverse proxy, an application container, and an in-memory cache all encapsulated in one single type. Radius Resource Types enable platform engineers to accomplish these exact scenarios. Platform engineers now have complete flexibility in defining the resources developers use in their applications and, separately, the implementation of those resources using Terraform configurations or Bicep templates (referred to generally as Recipes in Radius).

Deploy your Radius applications to Azure Container Instances

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0800

An important part of the Radius vision is to be platform agnostic, and that includes the underlying compute such that Radius can deploy the same application across different compute platforms. Thus, it’s always been a goal to support additional container runtimes beyond just Kubernetes. That’s why we’re excited to share that Radius now supports deploying your applications to additional container platforms, beginning with Azure Container Instances. This integration provides Radius users with a serverless container compute option that enables platform engineers to build developer platforms that are decoupled from specific container runtimes while still benefiting from the Radius application-centric approach and separation of concerns.

Platform Engineering : Integrating Radius into your GitOps Flux workflow

Tue, 20 May 2025 08:00:00 -0800

GitOps is an approach to managing infrastructure and applications using Git as the single source of truth and has become quite popular in the DevOps and Platform Engineering disciplines. This approach provides several benefits - including declarative management of infrastructure definitions and auditable change logs. Radius fits nicely into this workflow, allowing you to define your applications and infrastructure with Radius and then use GitOps to deploy and manage them across your deployment platforms.

Platform Engineering with Radius to build application-centric IDPs

Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 -0800

Very early in my career I worked on a long-forgotten system called the HP-3000. I wrote batch processing applications in Pascal to process financial transactions. Then I transitioned to being a web application developer. Moving from the world where each batch application had a single executable and maybe a few shared libraries to the world of web applications was a big change. I remember trying to wrap my head around how it all worked. There were so many different applications all communicating with other applications. Of course, I quickly learned that it was a simple model-view-controller pattern, and the application was just a collection of binaries and HTML templates.

Platform engineering with Radius at KubeCon London 2025

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0800

I had a great time at KubeCon London earlier this month presenting and demoing Radius and meeting members of the Radius community! Thanks to everyone for taking time to stop by and chat. It was very fun to meet so many community members in person versus over video conference. 😊

Anyone familiar with Radius will know that platform engineers have become the primary focus for the maintainers. That’s because so many Radius early adopters are platform engineering teams who are integrating Radius into their internal developer platforms (IDPs). A great example is Nuno Guedes and his platform engineering team at Millennium bcp (the largest private bank in Portugal). The Millennium bcp team has integrated Radius into their IDP and have been using it in production since December 2024. Nuno is the head of cloud at Millennium bcp and he and I co-presented on his use of Radius at KubeCon London. To learn more about how the Millennium bcp team is using Radius in their IDP, please check out our joint presentation How Millennium bcp Leverages Radius to Empower Developer + Operator Collaboration (CNCF YouTube channel | Slides from presentation).

Radius feature roadmap update

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0800

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

How Workload Identity Federation for Cloud Providers Work in Radius

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Radius enables infrastructure operators and application developers to define, deploy, and collaborate on cloud-native applications across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments. To deploy cloud resources, Radius needs an identity to authenticate, access, and communicate with cloud providers. These identities are stored as Radius credentials. Since its initial release, Radius has supported Azure service principal identity and AWS IAM user as Radius credentials to deploy Azure and AWS resources. While these approaches are straightforward, they require users to secure credentials by consistently following security best practices like periodic credential rotation and update. As of the v0.37 release, Radius supports Workload/Federated Identity to deploy cloud resources in AWS and Azure. Workload identity mitigates the challenge of manually managing credentials and eliminates the risk of exposing secrets or having certificates expire.

What I learned in six weeks working with Radius

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently joined the Azure Incubations team at Microsoft. In addition to Radius, the Azure Incubations team has helped build several open-source projects including Dapr, KEDA and Copacetic all of which are CNCF projects. Drasi is the team’s latest project which was just submitted to CNCF. Before joining the team, I knew very little about Radius aside from watching Brendan Burns and Mark Russinovich talk about it. Over the last six weeks I’ve learned a lot about how Radius is built, what it can do today, and what is in store for the future. I suspect many readers of this blog are new to Radius just like I was, so let me share with you what I have learned.

Happy 1st Birthday, Radius!

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0800

Today marks the first anniversary of the release of Radius as an open-source project! We are thrilled to celebrate this milestone with the community and reflect on the progress we have made together. In the past year, we have seen tremendous growth in the Radius community. We have welcomed new contributors, received valuable feedback, and collaborated on exciting new features. We have also expanded our documentation, improved our tooling, and released new versions of Radius, every month, with more capabilities. We are grateful to everyone who has contributed to Radius, whether through code, documentation, testing, or feedback. Your support has been invaluable, and we look forward to continuing to work together to build an even better platform.

Deploying the FINOS TraderX Application Using Radius

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Radius maintainers have been collaborating with members of the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) community in participation of their Tech Sprint 2024 event, during which we worked on a project to deploy the TraderX application using Radius. Our working group was able to build a CI pipeline for the application containers and Radify the TraderX application to deploy on local, AWS, and Azure environments using Radius. The project was demonstrated in a session at the Open Source in Finance Forum 2024 event in New York.

Separating Cloud and Non-Cloud Functional Tests in PR Workflows

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Functional Testing in Radius

Radius applies the test pyramid to divide the tests into groups for each feature. We have unit tests to check the functionality of individual units, such as a function, and functional tests to check the integration and interaction of multiple components of Radius to ensure they work together as expected.

Functional tests in Radius create resources in Kubernetes clusters that are spun up specifically for the tests and destroyed at the end of each test run. Additionally, some functional tests create and use cloud resources on Azure and AWS, which require sensitive data, such as provider secrets, to be used in the tests. For example, when one of our functional tests creates a Radius environment, that environment needs cloud credentials to create resources on Azure and/or AWS. Some of this sensitive information is stored at the organization level in GitHub, while other sensitive data is kept at the repository level.

How Radius Leveraged Bicep Extensibility

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0800

Radius and Bicep

Radius uses Bicep, an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, for defining applications and Recipes (Note that Radius also supports Terraform for defining Recipes.). When Radius was first being developed, we needed an infrastructure tool that enabled defining applications and resources in a simple declarative way while providing a high level of validation during compilation. We also needed the tool to improve the end-to-end developer experience from authoring applications to the deployment and management of resources. Around the same time, Bicep was being developed as a new language designed to address what has worked well and not worked well for other IaC languages across the industry. Bicep stood out because it offers a simple syntax for defining resources, and the built-in tooling and validation features (like intellisense and linting) provide a robust authoring experience. Additionally, Bicep is an open-source project which is a significant advantage given the active community and engagement around it.

How to Participate in the Radius Design Process

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you are interested in collaborating with the community to influence, design, and build the newest features in Radius, then you’ve come to the right place. From upvoting roadmap items to authoring and submitting design proposals, this blog post will walk you through all the ways you can participate in the Radius design process. Radius 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 by default. You can help realize this vision by providing your input on the Radius roadmap and by engaging in the community design process to improve Radius features.

Learn how to fork, build, and contribute to Radius

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hello future Radius contributor! This blog post will guide you through the process of contributing to the Radius project. Contributions can come in many forms, such as code contributions, documentation updates, bug reports, feature requests, and more. We welcome contributions from users of all skill levels, so don’t hesitate to get involved!

Getting started

Here are a few tips and things you’ll need to get started with contributing to Radius.

Building Cloud Agnostic Applications with Radius and Dapr

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0800

Multi-Cloud Usage Models

Most enterprises today use public clouds from multiple vendors like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, or they plan to do so in the near future. Reasons vary from company to company and industry to industry. Financial services providers face regulatory constraints that may only be addressed via multiple cloud providers in different geographic regions. Many enterprises have varied teams, each with specific skills, preferences and technical requirements that, in aggregate, require multiple clouds. Other enterprises simply hope to avoid lock-in to a particular vendor. While the specific scenarios and requirements vary, there is a growing trend toward using clouds from multiple vendors. In discussing Radius with scores of enterprises, we found three primary models among enterprises using clouds from more than one vendor:

Radius Accepted as Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox Project

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Microsoft Azure Incubations Team is excited to announce that Radius has been approved by the Cloud Native Compute Foundation as a Sandbox project, the entry point for new CNCF projects. This approval is a key step toward building a vibrant community and open governance for the Radius project in partnership with the CNCF, along with addressing the growing emphasis from enterprises on leveraging only CNCF approved projects for strategic cloud investments.

Understand your entire application with the Radius Application Graph

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In today’s complex landscape of cloud-native architectures, it can be difficult to understand how all the pieces of an application fit together. With the advent of containers, microservices, serverless, and Kubernetes, applications are becoming more flexible yet resilient than ever before, but at the cost of increased complexity. As a result, developers and operators struggle to understand how their applications are structured and how their resources are connected. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the challenges of understanding cloud-native applications and how the Radius Application Graph can help. We are very excited about the potential of the Application Graph and are looking forward to building upon it with the community!

Introducing the Radius feature roadmap

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0800

The Radius project maintainers are excited to share our feature roadmap for Radius! We are looking forward to working with the community to grow and enhance Radius and will keep this roadmap updated as we make progress.

We hope to encourage transparency in community engagement and collaboration by sharing our roadmap and priorities. Please treat the roadmap as a living document that reflects the current goals and plans of the project, which may change based on the landscape and community needs. Thus, target delivery dates are deliberately avoided. To remain agile and adaptive, after each release the Radius maintainers will reassess and update the roadmap as necessary to reflect the latest priorities. Additionally, note that the roadmap currently reflects the priorities of the project maintainers, but as more partners join us these may change. The community may also work on things that aren’t part of the roadmap.

Case Study: How Millennium bcp leverages Radius

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 08:00:00 -0800

Millennium bcp is Portugal’s largest privately owned bank, with over 1,300 branches serving more than 6 million customers around the world. In the ever-evolving landscape where finance intersects with technology, we consistently focus on generating business value through innovation and excellence. In our pursuit of delivering exceptional services to our customers, we understand the value of technical leadership and one of the keys to our vision and success has been continued use of the latest technologies to generate business value. We were among the first in our market to introduce ATMs and alternative payment methods, and one of the first to deploy online services like transactional websites and an online financial marketplace.

Introducing Radius, a new open-source application platform for cloud-native apps

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Developers and IT operators today know all too well the pain involved with deploying, managing, and making sense of applications in an ever-evolving and increasingly complicated cloud-native landscape. While it’s true that advancements in cloud infrastructure and platforms like Kubernetes have been gamechangers for developing flexible, scalable, and portable microservice applications, they have also made things more challenging for developers and operators alike. For developers, the complexity of managing infrastructure and lack of visibility into the resources that make up their applications are major roadblocks for productivity. For operators, the lack of standardization and automation in the deployment process can lead to loss of control over the infrastructure, and degradation of confidence in the applications that are deployed. At the end of the day, development teams are left with a disjointed experience between platforms and cloud providers. Developers and operators alike find themselves struggling to make sense of how their application comes together across disparate sets of tools that provide little more than a list of their deployed artifacts.