News

WSO2 Launches Open-Source Cloud Platform

• By John K. Waters
• June 4, 2010

Open-source middleware maker WSO2 has launched an open source cloud platform that should be of interest to enterprise Java developers. Called Stratos, it's a fully hosted application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for building and deploying apps and services "with instant provisioning of enterprise servers, including the portal, enterprise service bus (ESB) and application server."

Stratos is built on top of the company's Carbon product, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework built on the OSGi specification. OSGi defines an architecture for developing and deploying modular applications and libraries; it's a real, dynamic component model for Java applications. Equinox, the core runtime for the Eclipse framework, is an implementation of the OSGi.

"Essentially, we are making our entire Carbon platform available as a PaaS," said CEO Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana. "Every customer and every software vendor is saying, how do I make my software available as a service? We give you a complete platform that allows you to take any application or middleware product and make it available as a service."

In a recent blog posting, WSO2 CTO Paul Fremantle made the pitch for an open source PaaS solution. He argued that, so far, PaaS has addressed only the most basic requirements of enterprise core services: databases and a identity model.

"So my contention is this," he wrote, "you need a PaaS that supports the same core services that a modern Enterprise architecture has: ESB, BPMS, Authentication/Authorization, Portal, Data, Cache, etc. And you need a PaaS that works inside your organization as well as in a public Cloud. And if you really don't want any lock-in.... hadn't that PaaS better be Open Source as well?"

Stratos is being billed as "a complete SOA and developer platform" designed to enable IT teams to create, manage, and run enterprise-class apps and services "with all the inherent benefits of a true cloud-native environment." These include elasticity; multi-tenancy; billing, metering, and flexible monitoring; self-provisioning and management; dynamic, just-in-time discovery and wiring; and incremental deployment and testing.

"We're providing a convenient API and environment for developers who have write a service, so that they can focus on their part of the problem and delegate all the rest to the middleware," Weerawarana added.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based WSO2 was founded by members of the Apache Software Foundation's Web services community, and its products are based on Apache technologies. The WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) is based on Apache Axis2, and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is based on Apache Synapse.

In a related announcement, WSO2 disclosed a new Cloud Partnership initiative aimed at system integrators (Sis) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers "to streamline the development and deployment of applications and services that are fully optimized for enterprise clouds."

WSO2 Stratos is available now as an early-adopter release for private clouds, as a demonstration version on public clouds, and as an early release of the downloadable open source software. The product is fully open source, so no licensing fees are required. It's available for evaluation here. Registration is required.