Microsoft Corp. today open-sourced a couple of new application development tools aimed at making life easier for cloud developers.

The new projects include the Open Application Model, which is a specification for building cloud-native apps on Kubernetes, and Dapr, a portable event-driven runtime for building microservices-based apps that can run in the cloud and on edge devices.

Microsoft said it worked closely with Alibaba Cloud on OAM, which is intended to simplify the development and deployment of apps managed by Kubernetes. That should immediately pique the interest of thousands of developers, since Kubernetes is the most widely used orchestration software for managing modern containerized apps that can run on any kind of computing platform.

In a blog post, Microsoft explained that OAM is a specification for describing applications that ensures the app description is “separated from the details of how the application is deployed onto and managed by the infrastructure.”

Microsoft said that separation would be helpful to developers for a couple of reasons. “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,” Microsoft said.

In addition, the separation makes it possible to develop reusable components that can quickly be integrated with any application code, giving developers a quicker and easier way to build more reliable apps.

“In all of this, the goal of the Open Application Model is to make simple applications easy and complex applications manageable,” Microsoft said.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Kubernetes has won out as the most popular enabling technology for container apps, and that now the race is all about defining standards for how to access Kubernetes clusters, describe the load and how to build applications properly.

“No vendor would dare to propose proprietary standard, so open-source is the vehicle and today it is Microsoft’s turn to bring forward OAM, which is used to describe applications,” Mueller said. “Open-source standards don’t have much value without the endorsement of key players, and so it’s good to see that Alibaba has signed on already.”

Dapr also aims to make life easier for developers, providing a set of “microservices building blocks” for cloud and edge applications that can run on any infrastructure. Officials said Dapr, which is still in early alpha test mode, will support all programming languages and developer frameworks, and can be accessed by standard HTTP or gRPC programming interfaces.

“Dapr is completely platform agnostic, meaning you can run your applications locally, on any Kubernetes cluster, and other hosting environments that Dapr integrates with,” Microsoft said. “This enables developers to build microservices applications that can run on both the cloud and edge with no code changes.”

Photo: TheDailyExposition/Flickr; image: Microsoft