What is Radix
Omnia Radix is a Platform-as-a-Service ("PaaS", if you like buzzwords). It builds, deploys, and monitors applications, automating the boring stuff and letting developers focus on code. Applications run in ☁️ the cloud as 🐳 Docker containers, in environments that you define.
You can use Radix just to run code, but the main functionality is to integrate with a code repository so that it can continuously build, test, and deploy applications. For instance, Radix can react to a git push event, automatically start a new build, and push it to the test environment, ready to be tested by users.
To help improve Radix poke around in our open sourced repositories. We track issues and feature requests in the radix repo. Please log those! 🙂
Hosting/Infrastructure
In Radix we advocate Infrastructure as code and more specifically declarative infrastructure. This is done through the 📖 radixconfig.yaml file where you define how you would like your application to be hosted.
Radix is built on top of Kubernetes ☸️ hosted on Azure as a service (AKS). Knowledge around Kubernetes is NOT required for using Radix. However thoughts from Kubernetes has influenced Radix, so it can be a good with some basic understanding of what it is. VMware has a 5min video on youtube, or for those more interested we can recommend Introduction to Kubernetes course by linuxfoundation.
Kubernetes originates from the Greek language, meaning helmsman or pilot. You'll sometimes see Kubernetes referred to as K8s, 8 for the number of letters between the K and S.
CI / CD
Radix provide a simple way to automatically build and deploy (continuous integration/continuous deployment ♾️ - ci/cd your application based on the 📖 radixconfig.yaml file already mentioned. Alternatively, you can opt for using only the CD part of Radix. Teams that have a need for more advanced CI feature can use other CI tools and deploy into Radix.
Monitoring
Radix also provides monitoring for applications. There are default 📈 metrics (e.g. request latency, failure rate), but you can also output custom metrics from your code. Track things that are important for your application: uploaded file size, number of results found, or user preferences. Radix collects and monitors the data.
General information around monitoring in Radix in Radix guides. When you work with an application, link to a basic monitoring dashboard is available on your apps first page.