- Stratos Brochure
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WSO2 Stratos Meets CIO Challenges
- Press Release – WSO2 launches WSO2 Stratos Open Source Cloud Computing Platform for Enterprise Application Development
- Press Release – WSO2 Launches Cloud Partnership Initiative to Support WSO2 Stratos Cloud Computing Platform for Enterprise Application Development
- Blog: Cloud Native
- Blog: Platform-as-a-Service freedom or lock-in
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SOA & Cloud Computing: Love or hate?
Award-winning WSO2 Carbon Middleware Platform as a Service
The WSO2 Carbon platform encompasses the breadth of enterprise middleware capability, from hosting core services in the WSO2 Web Services Application Server and WSO2 Data Services, though connecting and composing services with the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus and WSO2 Business Process Server, to the screen with the WSO2 Mashup Server and WSO2 Gadget Server. All managed by the WSO2 Governance Registry, the WSO2 Identity Server and the WSO2 Business Activity Monitor. WSO2 Carbon has everything you need to build a modern enterprise application simply and quickly. Now this flexible and powerful platform can be deployed as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) on public or private cloud infrastructure – with WSO2 Stratos.
Stratos provides a web-based console for provisioning new tenants on the platform, allowing self-service provisioning of any WSO2 Carbon product, and running elastically on your choice of underlying virtualization infrastructure to provide all the PaaS benefits inherent to a cloud-native platform.
Why PaaS
We know IT managers regularly juggle three vital concerns – delivering new enterprise applications quickly, keeping costs in check, and maintaining these applications smoothly. With WSO2 Stratos you get all the advantages you’d expect from the cloud: world-class time-to-market, optimum utilization of your resource investments, and automatic governance and monitoring. WSO2’s cloud-native middleware running on public or private cloud infrastructure dramatically improves the responsiveness and efficiency IT can offer your enterprise.
Leaps Ahead in Time to Market
The developers within your enterprise encounter a host of delays in developing and deploying a project – getting budget approval, requisitioning the necessary server hardware, acquiring and installing middleware software. As development gets ever simpler, the difficulties of deployment become even clearer.
Cloud-native Middleware
Behind the revolutionary simplicity and efficiency of the Stratos development experience lies a middleware stack fundamentally designed for a cloud environment. “Cloud native” implies six points:
- Elasticity: Stratos manages your underlying cloud infrastructure to seamlessly handle the scalability demands of your application.
- Multi-tenancy: Departments, developer groups, or projects run fully independently, but share the same middleware platform for maximum resource utilization.
- Billing and Metering: Each tenant can meter their actual resource use for internal billing purposes.
- Self Provisioning: Authorized users can provision new tenants from a web portal in moments.
- Dynamic Discovery: Linking up services that reside in a dynamic and elastic environment can be tricky – but Stratos simplifies and automates this process with standards-based service discovery and automatic configuration capabilities.
- Incremental Testing: Cloud fundamentally changes the way you test and deploy applications, but doesn’t reduce your quality requirements! Stratos allows you to deploy service versions side by side and carefully dial up the traffic sent to each version.
With WSO2 Stratos deployed on your private cloud infrastructure, provisioning a new application becomes a simple, self-service process. Authorized developers can log on to your organization’s Stratos web portal, request a new middleware application or “tenant,” configure it to the specific needs of your application, and upload their services, business processes, or other artifacts. The application is ready to test. Instantly.
No Hardware to Requisition – the new app runs upon your private cloud, efficiently sharing the resources. No complex middleware software to install – the Stratos platform includes the whole range of middleware capabilities of the WSO2 Carbon platform.
Setting a New Level of Utilization
Virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service have become popular for increasing utilization of hardware resources. But significant inefficiencies remain – in this model each new middleware application requires its own virtual machine, middleware stack, and reserved memory allocation. And these allocations must be made before the application starts doing any useful work. The overhead for new applications becomes considerable.
Breaking lock-in
Many analysts recognize cloud as an opportunity for even deeper lock-in to a specific vendor or service provider.
- Service provider lock-in. WSO2 offers the only middleware platform available that spans the full range from on premise as traditional WSO2 Carbon-based middleware server applications, within your enterprise’s WSO2 Stratos-based private cloud, or as a public WSO2 Stratos Services offering (demo version now available.) WSO2’s commitment to Apache open source licensing ensures that you can move into the cloud – or back out of it – at your own comfortable pace.
- Data lock-in. WSO2’s Openness Promise ensures that you can fully export your data and applications from WSO2 Stratos Services.
- Programming model lock-in. WSO2 chooses open standard programming models and APIs wherever possible to maximize the portability of applications and business processes to other standards-based systems.
- Cloud infrastructure lock-in. WSO2 Stratos runs on a variety of cloud infrastructure platforms, matching your platform of choice now while allowing you to change infrastructure providers at any time.
With the Stratos runtime in place on your private cloud, new applications can be deployed as tenants within the cloud-native middleware stack. As a result, the overhead of a new application falls near to zero. Processing power, memory, and bandwidth are shared by other middleware applications and are only consumed as traffic starts flowing through the application. As an application requires more resources, Stratos scales elastically and transparently upon your cloud infrastructure to handle the load.
Governance and Monitoring Baseline
You know the advantages of an effective governance regime – but instituting it consistently often requires a lot of attention. With WSO2 Stratos, each new service or application deployed automatically participates in and benefits from the governance policies of the organization. Each service or application is individually monitored and can even be billed if you formalize your internal accounting.
Sounds great! What’s next?
Choose the best option for you to move to the next level:
- Contact us with questions or to talk .
- Ask us about our CloudStart program – on-site assistance configuring and deploying WSO2 Stratos in your enterprise.
- Sign up for a free WSO2 Stratos Services account – though remember it’s still in alpha!
- Download the complete WSO2 Stratos platform.
Developing a SaaS offering? Starting with a cloud-native platform gives you a leg up – and open source ensures you have the independence you need going forward. Contact us to see how we might be able to help.
Are you a cloud infrastructure or IaaS provider? Adding WSO2 Stratos to your offering increases the incentives for your enterprise customers to adopt or expand their cloud infrastructure. Contact us about our range of partnership opportunities.