Microsoft announces two open-source projects for building cloud and edge applications
Microsoft yesterday announced two new open-source projects ‘OAM’ and ‘Dapr’ to make developing of cloud, edge and Kubernetes applications easier for developers.
The first project is Open Application Model (OAM), which is an open standard for developing and operating applications on Kubernetes and other platforms.
While the second project is Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime), which is an open source project designed to make it easier for every developer to build microservice applications.
Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud have worked together to create the OAM project under the Open Web Foundation. The goal of the OAM is to make simple applications easy and complex applications manageable by Kubernetes.
For those unaware, Kubernetes is the most widely used open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management across clusters of hosts.
“OAM is a specification for describing applications so that the application description is separated from the details of how the application is deployed onto and managed by the infrastructure. This separation of concerns is helpful for multiple reasons,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
“In the real world, every Kubernetes cluster is different, from ingress to CNI to service mesh. Separating the application definition from the operational details of the cluster enables application developers to focus on the key elements of their application rather than the operational details of where it deploys. Furthermore, the separation of concerns also allows for platform architects to develop re-usable components and for application developers to focus on integrating those components with their code to quickly and easily build reliable applications.”
On the other hand, Microsoft describes Dapr as a set of “microservice building blocks for cloud and edge.” It is designed to make it easier for developers to build microservice applications.
“Dapr is an open source, portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge.
Dapr embraces the diversity of all programming languages and developer frameworks and simplifies building applications such as the e-commerce example,” Microsoft said in another blog post.
Dapr, which is still in early alpha test mode, allows developers to applications with any language and any framework and can be accessed over standard APIs such as HTTP or gRPC programming interfaces.
“Dapr consists of a set of building blocks accessed by standard HTTP or gRPC APIs that can be called from any programming language.
These building blocks empower all developers with proven, industry best practices and each building block is independent; you can use one, some, or all of them in your applications.
In addition, through the open-source project, we welcome the community to add new building blocks and contribute new components into existing ones. Dapr is completely platform agnostic, meaning you can run your applications locally, on any Kubernetes cluster, and other hosting environments that Dapr integrates with. This enables developers to build microservice applications that can run on both the cloud and edge with no code changes,” the company added.
You can learn more about OAM here and about Dapr here.