WSO2 Service Definitions and FAQ

A WSO2 Subscription provides a comprehensive enterprise service experience with WSO2 products. Each subscription includes:

  1. License to commercial distributions of WSO2 software products. Products are licensed under the current version of the WSO2 End User License Agreement unless your subscription contract identifies a previous version or incorporates additional terms.
  2. Access and license for WSO2 Updates delivered through WSO2 Update 2.0 and other channels. Updates provide preventative maintenance by eliminating known bugs and vulnerabilities before they impact your system. Subscribers also receive access to confidential security bulletins and alerts to potential vulnerabilities, as well as early access to security updates.
  3. Incident support, providing reactive maintenance for any incidents affecting your production or pre-production systems. We offer two support plans (12x5 and 24x7) with aggressive response and resolution times based on issue severity, plus no limits on the number of tickets you can raise. Resolutions often include the creation and delivery of a new update. Details are available in our Support Policy.
  4. One-business-day support for general queries about product usage, development or migration advice, product tuning, or best practices. Query support is subject to hourly caps, as defined by your support plan. The cap can be raised for a reasonable charge at any time.

Subscription services cover all your WSO2 product deployments, and all production systems must be included in the subscription. The subscription price covers most development, pre-production, and recovery systems. A subscription is a requirement for consulting services, managed hosting, and other value-added content and services.

Core-Based pricing

WSO2 Subscriptions are priced in units of computing cores utilized by the primary production systems. Each core-based subscription also includes, at no extra fee:

  • Up to 3 pre-production environments
  • Passive instances in an active/passive deployment
  • Analytics profiles
  • Bursting of on-premise production systems by up to 25% more cores, lasting for up to 3 cumulative days during the subscription year
  • Individual development machines, though please note that issues arising on such systems qualify for query support rather than incident support SLAs
  • Passive disaster recovery systems, i.e., systems that don’t accept live traffic until a failover of the primary system

Transactional Pricing

For certain of our products running in microservice-native environments, we offer an alternative pricing option based on maximum monthly transaction volumes. For WSO2 API Manager, governance/control plane instances are priced per core, and the microgateway profile or any gateway profiles can be added under a transactional pricing model. WSO2 Micro Integrator and WSO2 Streaming Integrator are also available under a transactional pricing model. However, when used in the absence of an API Manager control plane, they carry an annual base fee per data center (regional data center or cloud availability zone)

WSO2 counts one transaction as the following:

  • Each incoming request-response message pair processed by an API gateway or Micro Integrator instance
  • Each message received via an open WebSocket
  • An outgoing message when an asynchronous message exchange pattern is employed, and where outgoing messages not acting as a response in a request-response message exchange pattern, and which can be a data frame when data is streamed or an event initiated by the API gateway or EI instance

Please note that outbound requests to services that are directly caused by an incoming request message for the purpose of generating the corresponding response message (“back-end service calls”) are not counted as transactions. However, if such a request is directed to another API gateway or Micro Integrator instance, it will be counted as an incoming request relative to that instance.

The transactional price is relative to the expected maximum monthly transactions processed during the subscription period. Under this model, transactions are measured independently of how many instances, microservices, or data centers are deployed. To qualify for transactional pricing for on-premise deployments, WSO2 Analytics (or an equivalent) must be deployed, and a monthly report of the overall transaction volume must be provided to WSO2.

The transactional pricing model allows bursting by up to 25% over the cap for no more than a single month of the term. Beyond this allowance for unexpected traffic volumes, the subscription limits must be increased. Passive instances, traffic management nodes, and pre-production systems are exempt from the monthly limits.

Renewals

Per-unit pricing increases in line with the current WSO2 pricing unless provided otherwise in an order. To help you lock in your current rate for a longer period, we provide renewal options of one, two, or three years.

Multi-year periods paid upfront qualify for an additional 3% discount.

WSO2 Private Cloud

WSO2 Private Cloud provides a private deployment of WSO2 products, combining the ease of SaaS with the security of a private deployment and the full feature set of WSO2’s open source products. WSO2 Private Cloud includes all software licenses, infrastructure (on Microsoft Azure), management, and support services by WSO2’s expert team.

WSO2 Private Cloud includes:

  • Best-practice deployment patterns for robustness, performance, and scalability
  • One pre-production (staging/sandbox) environment
  • Choice of region (as available through Microsoft Azure)
  • 24x7 monitoring by the WSO2 Cloud team
  • System maintenance including applying updates and upgrades
  • Support account for hosting requests and incidents
  • Query Support to accelerate development
  • Development license to related WSO2 products to ensure on-prem development environments are in sync with the Private Cloud deployment
  • Backup and disaster recovery systems
    • SOC compliance (available soon)

Customer Success Manager

Premium support service is available by allocating an enterprise Customer Success Manager (CSM) to your account. The CSM is a named, primary point of contact for WSO2 support. Each CSM is a member of WSO2’s elite technical support team, providing priority responses to WSO2 product queries and issues, assisting in analyzing, reproducing, and isolating issues and resolving them, or coordinating a resolution or bug fix with the WSO2 support and product teams.

Subscribers with a named contact can access priority support from their CSM through email, phone, and chat in addition to the WSO2 online support system.

With a CSM, your Subscription’s query support limits are waived.

There are two levels of enterprise CSM: Premium and Elite.

Premium CSMs have a dedicated part-time schedule to provide guaranteed availability during a pre-agreed weekly schedule as a portion of work hours in a local time zone.

Elite CSMs work on-site locally; all travel and expense costs are included.

Level name Priority Support Dedicated schedule Unlimited query support On-site
Customer Success Manager – Premium YES 50% YES No
Customer Success Manager – Elite YES 100% YES YES

WSO2 Packaged Services Definition

QuickStart

Jump-starting an evaluation, proof of concept, or project is effectively accomplished through a QuickStart, which places two expert consultants at your site for a week of agile activity to get your team and your project efficiently off the ground. The scope of the QuickStart is carefully laid out in advance, encompassing goals such as:

  • Increasing awareness of product capabilities
  • Help defining the solution architecture
  • Help defining the deployment architecture
  • Help defining the implementation plan
  • Preparing the project team to begin implementation
  • Jointly develop prototype or proof-of-concept code for customer scenarios

The QuickStart can be delivered on-site or remotely. An on-site engagement places two WSO2 consultants at your location for a week (five consecutive days) of intensive work. Remote engagements are a 10-day collaboration, with daily 4-hour videoconference sessions and chat activity throughout for resource sharing and maintaining momentum with clarifications and follow-up between sessions. Each QuickStart includes follow-up with 10 hours of query support tickets.

Architecture and Configuration Reviews

WSO2 customers can benefit from the challenges and solutions other enterprises have implemented by reviewing their business goals and translating them into architecture requirements, applying best practices for architectural patterns, and adjusting projects as new requirements or environmental factors come to light. A basic Architecture Review teams you with a WSO2 Platform Architect for two days to discuss, review, generate, and document plans to ensure your project avoids costly pitfalls. Remote architecture reviews are conducted via 4-hour videoconference sessions split over four days.

For ongoing collaboration, WSO2 offers a discounted Quarterly Review Package consisting of four two-day on-site reviews to be scheduled approximately quarterly.

We also recommend a Configuration Review, working for two days with one of our Operational Specialists to review configurations, deployment environments and practices, security features, and monitoring to ensure every aspect of a reliable and secure production deployment is achieved. A remote configuration review is conducted via 4-hour videoconference sessions split over four days.

Architecture Checkpoints

Architecture checkpoints are carried out by WSO2 Platform Architects or Solution Architects. This one-day session reviews the current project, its business, solution, and deployment architectures to ensure that the project is on track from an architectural, deployment, and roadmap perspective. The session is also used to address any challenges and bottlenecks, align with best practices, and answer technical questions.

Training

WSO2 offers a broad array of training and certification classes applicable to all phases of your project lifecycle. Courses are modular and can be combined into a curriculum ideally suited to your level, needs, and project scope.

Each on-site class is led by a qualified Trainer and can accommodate up to 15 students. Training Lab Assistants ensure the lab work is efficiently completed and provide one-on-one attention to each student to ensure the training progresses on schedule. When combined training topics require wider expertise, we may send two Trainers, who then act as Lab Assistants for each other. Lab Assistants are not required when class sizes are eight students or less or for training engagements lasting a single day. A fixed on-site administrative fee (one time per trainer or lab assistant per engagement) covers all administrative and travel expenses.

Remote training is delivered via videoconference and chat sessions in 4-hour segments. For larger classes, lab assistants assist students through chat or online breakout rooms under a recommended 1:8 teacher/assistant to student ratio.

Please visit https://wso2.com/training for examples of training scope and self-paced learning alternatives.

API Hackathon-in-a-Box

Launching an API platform is just the start of the journey – it will only be as successful as its user community. Hackathons provide a great way to engage with this community, inspire new ways to use the APIs, and have proven to be successful in accelerating and increasing adoption. WSO2 can work with you to hold a successful hackathon for your APIs by leveraging our expertise in organizing and executing technical events large and small.

It's a simple, step-by-step approach and entails the following key elements:

  • Providing a proven base agenda to customize to your needs and audience, keynoted with your pitch to the attendees about the scope and power of your API platform
  • Providing marketing support prior to, during, and after the event
  • Handling registrations
  • Providing API experts for “walk-around” support during the hackathon
  • Providing JIRA system for collecting issues and feature requests
  • Organizing event conclusion activities – judging, awards, networking
  • Review the event with you to extract actionable feedback

The API Hackathon-in-a-Box is pre-configured as a single on-site or virtual day-long (12-hour) event appealing to both internal and external audiences. Please ask our team for more information about what is included and how we can customize it for your goals.

Licensing and Subscription FAQ

Are WSO2 products open source?

Yes, the source code for downloadable WSO2 products is available under an open source license from our community site on GitHub. Community distributions and custom builds from this source are not commercially supported by us. For enterprise users, we offer supported distributions under the WSO2 Software License, which have been extensively validated and packaged for convenient consumption, including all of the features of the open source product as well as including update handling features. Along with a license, a WSO2 Subscription includes access to updates and enterprise-quality support services. Many other valuable services can be added to your Subscription, such as architecture and configuration reviews and managed cloud hosting.

Why should I choose the commercial distribution?

We recommend you begin your evaluation with the commercial distribution - it’s free for evaluation use, and you will receive the latest updates during your evaluation period. This provides the best evaluation experience possible. When your evaluation is complete and you are ready for production deployment, you can continue to use the commercial distribution and be eligible for support and to receive updates by becoming a Subscriber.

Commercial distributions meet the stringent requirements of enterprise use. While bug and security fixes are rolled into the next public open source release at some time in the future, Subscribers receive these fixes immediately as updates to your current deployed version, avoiding the need to engage in a full upgrade cycle to take advantage of the improvements. WSO2-supported commercial versions are eligible for updates for at least three years, so you have more control over your product upgrade cycles.

If you experience any issue, WSO2 stands by Subscribers to work with you to resolve any issue and provide the fastest fix available – reducing the risk of an extended outage that could damage your business operations, customer experience, reputation, or bottom line. Support issues are handled confidentially in our support system’s secure, private forum.

I have a cluster of ten product instances. Can I have one product under Subscription and run the other nine instances as open source?

No. Our license terms do not allow this.

WSO2 product updates may only be used in the commercial distribution under the terms of the WSO2 Software License. We do not support open source releases or allow a mix of licensed and open source distributions that will muddy license compliance and applicability of support. We also know from experience that large deployments are more complex, and much of our development effort goes towards clustering, administration, performance testing, and tuning, and our prices scale accordingly.

I am using several different WSO2 products. Can I put some types of products under Subscription and use other types without support?

No. WSO2 products comprise a platform, and a Subscription includes all product usage. It’s impractical to provide support in a mixed commercial/free environment. We retain the option to refuse to offer or renew Subscriptions for customers that don’t want to put their entire WSO2 deployment under subscription.

What are the consequences of allowing my Subscription to lapse?

Our license and subscription are tightly coupled. If your Subscription lapses, so does your license to use the supported distributions. If you wish to continue to use open source releases, before discontinuing your Subscription, you will have to migrate to the open source release. The open source release will not entitle you to updates, security bulletins, support, or other Subscription services.

If my Subscription lapses, can I restart it at any time?

Yes, we are always happy to welcome you back as a customer. However, “lapsing” implies continuing to use the software after the Subscription ends, which would violate the WSO2 Software License. To maintain compliance, we would backdate the Subscription to the expiration date. If you have migrated to an open source release and decide to migrate back to a supported distribution, we will happily offer you a new Subscription.

How can I bring my Subscription back into compliance?

License violation, either using licensed software outside of the Subscription term or in excess of the limits defined in the Subscription, must be corrected within 60 days of discovery and notification thereof. Compliance is restored by purchasing a back-dated Subscription for the period of unlicensed usage, beginning at the point license violation first occurs and continuing until either the point the Software is fully removed from the customer environment, or the point a new Subscription is established.

For lapsed Subscriptions, our policy is to resolve license compliance violations fairly and accurately. In most cases our desire is to correct the license violation in a way that propels us into a productive relationship going forward while protecting our interests as a business. We may seek remedies including, but not limited to:

  • Charging up to the full list price (at the time violation occurs) for the Subscription fees required to correct the license violation
  • Suspension of any technical support services until compliance is restored
  • Requesting additional license compliance assessment mechanisms in a new Subscription
  • Denying access to a new Subscription
  • Termination of related agreements (e.g. partnerships, MSAs)
  • Pursuing other appropriate legal remedies to ensure Software has been removed

Subscription Pricing

What are the pricing options available?

We price a WSO2 Subscription based on “cores” on which the active WSO2 product servers are deployed. The more instances of the products (e.g., for high-availability, distributed deployment, or multiple data centers), the more cores will be required. In microservice environments (e.g., Kubernetes), this becomes impractical, so we offer our microservice-capable products on a transactional basis. In this case, the Subscription price will be based on the overall monthly transaction load of the entire system.

What is the basic definition of a “core”?

A core measures a single hardware hyperthread. Modern CPUs usually have multiple physical processing units and hyperthreading, exposing each processing unit as one or more logical processors. For example, many of our desktop machines have at least one dual-core processor. With hyperthreading enabled, this is exposed as four logical processors, which map to four cores to cost out a WSO2 Subscription. Operating system utilities generally show the capabilities as a count of “logical processors” or “threads.” Virtualized environments have analogs.

Are the number of instances per core limited?

No. You can run as many instances of any WSO2 product or profile as you wish within the core allotment. WSO2 solution architects can help you design a mapping of WSO2 product instances to virtual machines and determine the size of these virtual machines to achieve your performance and reliability goals.

How do we measure cores for bare metal?

Hardware server environments generally have a utility showing the count of sockets, cores, and logical processors or hyperthreads. The number of logical processors maps to a core count for purposes of costing out a WSO2 Subscription.

How do we measure cores in Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 can be purchased in a variety of instance types that each specify the number of default virtual CPUs (vCPUs). For instance, a t2.xlarge instance has four default vCPUs. Each default vCPU counts as one core for purposes of a WSO2 Subscription, even if you configure the instance to use a lower number of cores or threads.

How do we measure cores in Docker?

By default, a Docker container utilizes the full capability of the host machine, and core counts will be determined by that host environment. By using the --cpus option, a Docker container can be constrained to a specific maximum utilization of the host environment’s capabilities. The maximum utilization maps into cores for purposes of a WSO2 Subscription. Fractional amounts are allowed both by Docker and within the WSO2 Subscription, e.g., three Docker containers constrained by the --cpus=1.5 option will map into a Subscription for 4.5 cores.

How do we measure cores in Kubernetes?

A Kubernetes “CPU unit” counts as a core for purposes of a WSO2 Subscription. A CPU Unit usually maps to an underlying Amazon vCPU, an Azure vCore, a GCP Core, or a bare metal hyperthread.

How do we measure cores in Azure?

An Azure “vCore” or “vCPU” counts as a core for purposes of a WSO2 Subscription.

How do we measure cores in Google Cloud?

A GCP machine type specifies compute units in vCPUs; each vCPU counts as one core for purposes of a WSO2 Subscription.

How do we measure cores in VMWare?

Each VSphere vCPU counts as one core for purposes of a WSO2 Subscription.

How do we measure cores in OpenStack?

Each OpenStack vCPU counts as one core for purposes of a WSO2 Subscription.

Can I run multiple JVMs within a single server or VM?

Yes. For instance, an 8-core server that hosts both WSO2 API Manager and WSO2 Enterprise Integrator JVMs is still priced at eight cores.

We underestimated our WSO2 usage at the beginning of the year and ended up deploying more than our Subscription allows. How will I be charged for the extra use?

When your installation expands beyond the limits in your Subscription, please notify us promptly, as exceeding the limits noted in the Subscription agreement can result in a violation of the WSO2 Software License and/or a suspension of support services. The Subscription Agreement allows you to expand usage limits on a prorated basis; we can calculate these additional fees for you.

We also offer Enterprise License Agreements that build in expectations for expansion and make it easier during the term.

Can I adjust my core allotment or transactional capacity limit upwards and downwards to handle seasonal bursts?

You can adjust your core allotment or transactional capacity cap upwards at any time, for a prorated fee. Though you are allowed some bursting capacity over these limits for a limited time to accommodate unexpected short-term loads, an anticipated seasonal burst should be properly planned for in your Subscription. If you have such seasonal traffic, you might consult with your Account Manager on whether you qualify for an Enterprise Level Agreement (ELA), which can provide additional headroom for seasonal traffic.

Support Services

Why is there a query support limit?

Query Support is a very open-ended offering - it allows you to ask questions about the product, about your deployment, about advice on how to implement your system with WSO2, about interactions with other products, etc. Because there is no circumscribed scope, we need to place some limits on the usage in order to ensure our low Subscription prices do not become unprofitable. The query support limit allows us to track usage and prevent this from becoming an open-ended consulting loophole - if the query support limit is insufficient, it’s a good indicator that a more traditional consulting engagement is needed

I did not use up the annual query support limit in my subscription. Can these hours be rolled over into the next term?

No. We provide a built-in free limit that is ample for most customers and have priced it accordingly, with the expectation that few customers will need to go beyond it. We do, however, offer top-up packages to customers with extraordinary usage.

I've found and reported a bug through my support account. Will it use up my query support hours?

No. If a query is determined to represent a bug in the product or documentation, we will move the issue to our product bug tracking system and resolve it there at no charge to you.

My system is in production, and I have a Subscription. Now I'm working on some further enhancements, new applications, and evaluating additional WSO2 products. Can I ask questions about those under Query Support?

Yes. Every subscription includes queries for the express purpose of answering questions about new development, upgrades, migration, and other matters that are not causing an immediate impact on your production systems.

What level of support for tooling is included in my Subscription?

Queries (rather than incidents) can be used for inquiries about the tooling provided with your product.