WSO2 launches first Apache Stratos PaaS

What is claimed to be the first comprehensive, enterprise-grade PaaS to be based on the recently introduced Apache Stratos 4.0 PaaS framework has just been launched by WSO2. According to the company, the launch supports the growth of cloud-enabled, connected businesses that demand a PaaS capable of handling the disparate applications and tools used by companies, their customers and partners.

“A year ago we donated our PaaS foundation to Apache to support the open source community in developing PaaS solutions that address the industry’s need for robust multi-tenancy and support for the heterogeneous environments that power enterprises”

To be known as Private PaaS 4.0, it features a cartridge-based architecture that enables developers to plug-in heterogeneous applications and service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform runtimes to take advantage of native, secure multi-tenancy. Significantly, providing multi-tenancy at the in-container level, it enables the deeper level of multi-tenancy required to support SaaS applications.

Version 4.0 adds significant new features inherited from Apache Stratos 4.0, including two industry firsts. These are real-time auto-scaling enabled by complex event processing (CEP) for more powerful analysis of the runtime environment, and smart policies for deploying cartridges, auto-scaling, and partitioning.

“A year ago we donated our PaaS foundation to Apache to support the open source community in developing PaaS solutions that address the industry’s need for robust multi-tenancy and support for the heterogeneous environments that power enterprises,” said Paul Fremantle, WSO2 co-founder and CTO. “The result is Apache Stratos 4.0, which adds innovative firsts in intelligently managing cloud capacity and which we are proud to make available with the launch of Private PaaS 4.0.”

It includes the WSO2 PaaS Foundation, which is an instance of the Apache Stratos PaaS framework; all of the pre-integrated, cloud-ready, and fully multi-tenant WSO2 Carbon Middleware products; and cartridges for MySQL, PHP and Apache TomCat.

Through the use of jclouds, it also offers the ability to run on almost any infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud, including SUSE Cloud and other OpenStack-based offerings, VMware vCloud, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Version 4.0 also includes several new and enhanced capabilities that are inherited from Apache Stratos 4.0, such as real-time auto-scaling based on multiple factors, which is enabled by the integration of real-time and rule-based decision-making, smart policies for auto-scaling, deployment, and partitioning, and expanded load-balancer support deployable as a cartridge.

There is a new Advanced Message Queuing Protocol(AMQP) message broker for loosely coupled communication among all the components, making the overall architecture more resilient and pluggable, and new support cartridges based on Microsoft .NET have also bee added.

In addition to those, five products from the WSO2 Carbon platform  are now available as plug-in cartridges, which enables them to take advantage of auto-scaling. These include WSO2 Application Server 5.2.1, WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 4.8.1, WSO2 Business Process Server 3.2, WSO2 Identity Server 5.0, and WSO2 API Manager 1.7. Other WSO2 Carbon products, not yet available as cartridges, continue to run as core services within WSO2 Private PaaS.