Microsoft recently announced two new open-source projects to aid developers in day-to-day operations OAM and Dapr.
Microsoft in conjunction with Alibaba Cloud has developed the Open Application Model (OAM), a specification that defines resources that the applications need to run on in Kubernetes clusters. Dapr is a portable event-driven runtime that helps reduce the complexity of building microservices. These two open-source application development tools aim to ease development, deployment, and resource management operations for developers.
Kubernetes is the most widely used management software for modern containerized applications. It can be used on any computing platform and is already used by thousands of cloud developers. OAM specification is used to narrate each component; it ensures that all the details of how an application is deployed and managed by the infrastructure are separated from the application description.
Microsoft claims that the separation will be helpful for developers distinguish the application definition from the operational details of the cluster where it is deployed. The separation is said to assist the development of reusable components, which can be integrated with any application code, giving developers a quicker and easier way to build more reliable apps.
Dapr, the other open-source project that can be called from any programming language, consists of a set of building blocks accessed by standard HTTP or gRPC APIs. The set building blocks are independent, hence a developer can use one, some, or all blocks. The developers can even add new building blocks and contribute new components. Dapr can run across multiple platforms. Therefore, a developer can use any Kubernetes cluster and other hosting environments that Dapr integrates with.
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