Briefing Notes: WSO2, the Enterprise Middleware Company

CloudStory.in met with Chris Haddad, VP of Technology Evangelism of WSO2, the enterprise middleware company at Structure 2013. We talked about their flagship PaaS platform - Stratos. Here is the briefing report.Stratos 2.0

Stratos 2.0 is WSO2's open source middleware software that enables a PaaS platform on top of various IaaS platforms - Amazon EC2, VmWare's vCloud and OpenStack. Stratos Foundation provides core functionalities like scaling, billing, metering, messaging, identity services etc. Its core components include Cloud Controller (which is responsible for spinning up the instances in the IaaS platform underneath), Stratos Controller (which is responsible for breaking down the applications in to per-instance components and deploying them in to right instances, Elastic Load Balancer and a management console. Together with the services and core components, the Stratos Foundation enables a multi-tenant, secure PaaS platform.

Applications at the platform level are supported through pluggable components called Cartridges. For instance, MySQL workloads are supported through MySQL Cartridge.

Cartridge

Cartridge is a pluggable component on top of the Stratos Foundation which enables encapsulation a specific application. Stratos 2.0 comes with pre-built cartridges for MySQL, PHP, TomCat and Carbon (WSO2'smiddleware platform). One can also build a custom cartridge using WSO2 Developer Studio. Carbon cartridges are deployed using Puppet modules. A cartridge can be either single tenant (can support only one tenant per cartridge) or multi-tenant (can support more than one tenant per cartridge). PHP Cartridges are single tenant, while Carbon cartridges are multi-tenant.

Apache Foundation

WSO2 also has open sourced Stratos Foundation under Apache Foundation. This move adds PaaS capabilities to the Apache software bundle. This also places Stratos potentially next to the likes of highly adopted software like TomCat, Apache Web Server.

Capabilities

Stratos provides cloud-native capabilities like multi-tenancy, elasticity, metering, self-service provisioning, billing etc. It also supports public, private and hybrid clouds and also multiple cloud platforms simultaneously. WSO2 App Factory, built on top of WSO2 Stratos supports a complete continuous delivery cycle that starts from committing code into GitHub, to a Jenkins continuous build, to automatic Puppet deployment into the PaaS cloud

Check their competitive analysis against major PaaS providers at here (you need to sign-up to download the whitepaper). Read more about their scoring mechanism here.

Summary

Stratos places WSO2 strategically among existing PaaS providers. With more and more enterprises adopting private cloud solutions for their needs, Stratos fits in the right place.