WSO2 today announced the launch of WSO2 Stratos 1.0, the industry’s first complete cloud middleware platform for implementing an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA). The 100% open source WSO2 Stratos is built on top of and extends WSO2 Carbon, the award-winning, OSGi-compliant enterprise middleware. With WSO2 Stratos, IT professionals have a fully hosted application platform as a service (PaaS) for rapidly building and deploying composite applications and services—with instant provisioning on a public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud.

WSO2 Stratos offers all the benefits of the cloud without the complexity or fear of vendor lock-in. First, its automated, integrated and highly scalable infrastructure plus self-provisioning enable shorter project times. Second, multi-tenancy means applications managed by different business units or regional offices can be delivered cost-effectively from a single location. Third, multi-tenancy, metering and auto-scaling reduce costs by optimizing data center utilization and letting tenants pay only for what they use. Fourth, built-in automated governance facilitates control over applications and services across different tenants. Finally, because WSO2 Stratos is based on the open source WSO2 Carbon, applications can be migrated smoothly and safely on premise, to a private cloud, to the public cloud, or to a hybrid environment—providing unprecedented deployment flexibility.

Version 1.0 builds on the early release of WSO2 Stratos launched in June 2010 by providing new features for auto-scaling and single sign-on, as well as enhanced functionality for automatic activity monitoring, usage metering, and centralized governance and identity management. Additionally with WSO2 Stratos 1.0, all of the WSO2 Carbon middleware products are now deployable as WSO2 Stratos cloud services, including:

• WSO2 Data Services as a Service (new)
• WSO2 Business Processes as a Service (new)
• WSO2 Business Rules as a Service (new)
• WSO2 Business Activity Monitoring as a Service (new)
• WSO2 Mashups as a Service (new)
• WSO2 Application Server as a Service (enhanced)
• WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus as a Service (enhanced)
• WSO2 Gadgets as a Service (enhanced)
• WSO2 Governance as a Service (enhanced)
• WSO2 Identity as a Service (enhanced)

“The cloud is a compelling platform for enterprises seeking greater agility, better cost management, and improved interactions with customers and partners,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “WSO2 Stratos 1.0 delivers on the promise of cloud computing with a complete, enterprise middleware platform for delivering applications that can run on—and integrate with—any combination of private clouds, public clouds and on-premise systems.”

WSO2 Stratos 1.0 Features

At the heart of the WSO2 Stratos PaaS is a Cloud Manager. This server manages all other services and offers a Web portal for self-provisioning where users can log in and register their domain (tenant), manage their account, and configure the middleware services that are available for their users. The Cloud Manager offers point-and-click simplicity for configuring and provisioning middleware services, so developers can get started immediately and focus on the business logic, rather than configuring and deploying software systems.

The integration layer within WSO2 Stratos allows it to install onto any existing cloud infrastructure such as Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Amazon EC2, and VMware ESX. Enterprises are never locked into a specific infrastructure provider or platform.

The multi-tenant architecture of WSO2 Stratos enables IT departments to optimize the data center by ensuring that tenants can share hardware resources, as well as by providing metering and monitoring services with rich analytics on the usage of each tenant, which can be used to determine billing or cost-sharing. WSO2 Stratos 1.0 offers several new and enhanced features. These include:

• New auto-scaling capabilities. WSO2 Stratos automatically adjusts the use of cloud resources to meet increased or decreased demand, helping enterprises to optimize data utilization by enabling tenants to efficiently share compute resources and consolidating peak-demand overhead.
• New single sign-on functionality. Users only need to sign on once to access all WSO2 Stratos services that they are authorized to use.
• Enhanced automatic activity monitoring. Activity monitoring is now available in real time, so there is no time gap between data collection and the availability of data for monitoring.
• Enhanced usage metering. Metering is now automated so that every operation by a tenant or its users will be monitored and recorded. The metering information can be used for billing or for offering constrained access for certain tenants.
• Enhanced centralized governance and identity management. All the resources of all WSO2 Stratos services can be monitored and governed from a single point (from WSO2 Governance as a Service). Any modification made in one place, such as changing a security policy or changing the keystore, is immediately visible to all other places. Also, all services share a single user store, so when a user is added from a service, this new user can immediately access all of the tenant’s services.

All WSO2 Stratos services can take advantage of WSO2 Carbon Studio, the fully open source Eclipse-based integrated developer environment (IDE). Launched in October 2010, WSO2 Carbon Studio provides a new level of ease in building SOA and composite applications based on WSO2 Carbon and WSO2 Stratos.

Availability and Support

WSO2 Stratos 1.0 is available today for enterprise private clouds and virtual private clouds, as well as for independent software vendors (ISVs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and software as a service (SaaS) providers. WSO2 also offers free trial accounts of WSO2 Stratos on the public WSO2 PaaS, with enterprise-level hosting options coming in 2011. As a fully open source solution, WSO2 Stratos does not require any licensing fees. WSO2 offers a range of service and support options, including evaluation support, the CloudStart consulting program, development support, and production support.

The CloudStart program, priced at $17,500, provides an engineering team onsite for a week to deploy WSO2 Stratos on either Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud or the customer’s existing cloud infrastructures, plus one additional month of follow-up support. The CloudStart Program is based on the highly successful QuickStart^SM program, which has helped many enterprises demonstrate the utility and cost-effectiveness of the WSO2 platform.