WSO2 Launches WSO2 Stratos 2.0, the Industry’s Most Complete, Open Enterprise-grade PaaS Available Today

SOURCE: WSO2

San Francisco, CA – June 19, 2013 – Just as enterprises have achieved flexibility and innovation from implementing heterogeneous environments on-premises, they now seek to extend these benefits into the cloud. Today, WSO2 debuted its answer to this growing demand with the launch of WSO2 Stratos 2.0, the industry’s most complete, open enterprise-grade platform as a service (PaaS). WSO2 Stratos 2.0 features an all-new cartridge-based architecture, which combines support for heterogeneous applications and service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform runtimes with native, secure multi-tenancy. WSO2 unveiled the latest release of WSO2 Stratos at GigaOm Structure, which runs June 19-20 in San Francisco.

WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is now available and includes the WSO2 Stratos PaaS Foundation; all pre-integrated, cloud-ready, and fully multi-tenant WSO2 Carbon middleware products; and cartridges for PHP and MySQL. Developers and third-party vendors also can develop their own cartridges for WSO2 Stratos 2.0. Through the use of jclouds—an Apache incubator project—WSO2 Stratos 2.0 offers the ability to run on almost any infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud, including SUSE Cloud and other OpenStack-based offerings, VMware, Eucalyptus, and Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). Significantly, WSO2 Stratos can coordinate across multiple different IaaS clouds at the same time. Like all WSO2 software, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is 100% open source and is available under the Apache License 2.0.

“Too often enterprises are asked to make trade-offs between the flexibility to work with their preferred systems and the ability to capitalize on the benefits of PaaS multi-tenancy. With WSO2 Stratos 2.0, these organizations no longer have to compromise,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “WSO2 Stratos 2.0 extends our long-standing commitment to supporting heterogeneous environments in the cloud—both through the new plug-in simplicity of adding third-party cartridges and expanded support for the mix of IaaS platforms that enterprises are running today.”

Plugging in Multi-tenant Cloud Capabilities

At the core of WSO2 Stratos is the WSO2 Stratos PaaS Foundation, which provides cloud-native capabilities, such as multi-tenancy, elastic scaling, self-service provisioning, metering, billing, and resource pooling, among others. Running on top of the Foundation are pre-integrated, fully multi-tenant WSO2 Carbon middleware products that deliver a range of PaaS services. These include WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB), WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 Application Server, WSO2 Governance Registry, WSO2 Business Activity Monitor, WSO2 Business Process Manager, WSO2 Business Rules Server, WSO2 Identity Server, WSO2 Complex Event Processor, and WSO2 Message Broker.

Through the new cartridge architecture in version 2.0, WSO2 Stratos now enables developers to easily plug in any runtime as a service—not just WSO2 middleware, but also third-party runtimes—into the WSO2 Stratos PaaS Foundation. A cartridge is a cloud-aware platform environment that extends legacy technologies into the cloud and delivers cloud benefits. It can wrap a cloud-ready, multi-tenant product, such as WSO2 ESB. Additionally, cartridges can wrap traditional, non-cloud-aware application platform containers, such as PHP and MySQL, and extend these technologies into a multi-tenant cloud deployment.

WSO2 Stratos 2.0 ships with all WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware products, which are now pre-integrated through cartridges, as well as cartridges for PHP and MySQL. Post-launch, WSO2 plans to deliver a number of other popular runtimes. Developers also can create their own custom cartridge types and host applications, containers or frameworks as PaaS-enabled services in WSO2 Stratos 2.0.

Expanding the Scope of Multi-tenancy

With WSO2 Stratos 2.0, multi-tenancy goes beyond other PaaS environments to support multiple levels of virtualization—from standard virtual machines, Linux Containers, and even intra-process isolation. The resource sharing choices offer the correct isolation levels across multiple tenants and are a significant factor in enabling lower costs, increasing flexibility, and providing an easier on-ramping to a private or public cloud environment.

The new tenant-aware elastic load balancer in Stratos 2.0 is a first-of-a-kind capability that allows the environment to provide highly tunable performance across different tenant requirements, ranging from “economy class” for low priority workloads up to “private jet” mode for workloads that require dedicated resources. Core capabilities include load monitoring, auto-scaling, and the ability to accept both static and dynamic cluster domain registrations.

Enhanced Cloud Deployment

WSO2 Stratos 2.0 significantly enhances PaaS deployment through the WSO2 Stratos Cloud Controller and an integration layer that uses the popular jclouds technology to allow it to run on any IaaS including OpenStack, VMware, Eucalyptus and CloudStack.

The Cloud Controller is the central location where the service topology resides; it is responsible for periodically sharing the up-to-date service topology among other Stratos 2.0 core services, and it supports hot updates and deployment of its configuration files. Significantly with WSO2 Stratos 2.0, the Cloud Controller acts as a bridge between the application level and IaaS level via jclouds, which enables the PaaS deployment to dynamically “cloud burst” or scale across multiple IaaS providers.

Additionally, use of the Puppet open source tool for infrastructure deployment in version 2.0 makes it easier than ever to install and configure WSO2 Stratos in a private or public cloud environment.

Partners Cite WSO2 Stratos 2.0 Advantages

“Enterprises moving to cloud-based delivery models understand that open source software provides rapid innovation and helps avoid vendor lock-in,” said Michael Miller, vice president of global alliances and marketing at SUSE. “The innovative cartridge approach of WSO2 Stratos 2.0 combined with OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud allow IT organizations to quickly adapt their cloud deployments as their needs change, while minimizing risk.”

“More IT organizations are recognizing the promise of the cloud to provide an agile environment for solution delivery while retaining control of security and performance,” said Ruben van der Zwan, CEO at Yenlo, a software development and consulting company focused on middleware and business process management, and preferred WSO2 partner. “We are turning this promise into reality by delivering the solutions based on the comprehensive WSO2 Stratos PaaS and industry-leading services and support, and we look forward to building on this success with the significant new flexibility in version 2.0.”

Availability and Support

WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is available today. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees. WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is backed by a world-class technical team in which the experts that helped create the software provide support, leading to direct and immediate access to the people with in-depth knowledge of the middleware. WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, a special QuickStart^SM consulting program, development support, and production support.

About WSO2

WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them. For more information, visit http://wso2.com, or check out the WSO2 community on theWSO2 Blog,Twitter,LinkedIn,Facebook, andFriendFeed.