WSO2 delivers first middleware platform designed to run both on-premise and in the cloud

Fewer enterprises are locking themselves into one deployment model. Instead, they are implementing applications on-premise, in the cloud, and in hybrid environments—depending on the model that best suits their privacy, service-level agreement (SLA), and requirements for a given project. WSO2 provides these organizations unprecedented deployment flexibility with today’s launch of WSO2 Carbon 4.0, the industry’s first enterprise middleware platform designed from the core to run both on-premise and in the cloud. WSO2 also announced today:
• Updates to the major WSO2 Carbon 4.0 products with added capabilities for cloud integration, security, auto-scaling, big data, and high availability (HA).
• WSO2 Stratos 1.6, the newest release of WSO2’s cloud middleware platform, which enables enterprises to deploy a platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
• New release of WSO2 StratosLive, the PaaS hosted by WSO2, which is powered by WSO2 Stratos 1.6 and WSO2 Carbon 4.0 software.

The latest release of WSO2’s award-winning 100% open source WSO2 Carbon platform adds multi-tenancy to all 13 WSO2 Carbon middleware products. Running directly on server hardware or in a virtualized environment, such as an Amazon or VMware cloud, these products can bring the efficiencies of multi-tenancy and self-service to on-premise deployments. Additionally, the cloud-ready WSO2 Carbon 4.0 middleware products can plug into WSO2 Stratos and operate as part of a PaaS, adding cloud-native capabilities, such as elastic scaling, expanded self-service provisioning, metering, billing, and storage, among others. The move brings unprecedented ease to IT professionals, who can write an application once and then simply deploy it on the same middleware on-premise, on a PaaS, or in a hybrid environment.

“We realized from a very early stage that enterprises need to implement their applications and services flexibly and seamlessly, both on-premise and in the cloud, as their business and IT demands change,” said Paul Fremantle, WSO2 co-founder and CTO. “The launch of WSO2 Carbon 4.0 defines a new level of simplicity in addressing this demand. Using our middleware, enterprises know that their investment in tools and applications is protected whether they want to deploy on-premise, in a private cloud or in a public cloud.”

WSO2 Carbon 4.0 Core Capabilities
WSO2 Carbon is the industry’s first fully componentized middleware platform for creating, running and managing composite applications and Web services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud environment. Built on the OSGi specification, WSO2 Carbon lets developers easily deploy and customize any of its WSO2 Carbon-based middleware products, and the 175-plus components on which they are comprised, providing greater flexibility and agility to meet changing enterprise demands.

The WSO2 Carbon core framework provides all WSO2 middleware products with a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities. With WSO2 Carbon 4.0, the framework adds multi-tenancy capabilities that are inherited by all 13 WSO2 Carbon middleware products. These include the WSO2 Application Server 5.0, WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 4.5, WSO2 Data Services Server 3.0, WSO2 Governance Registry 4.5, WSO2 Identity Server 4.0, WSO2 API Manager 1.0, WSO2 Business Process Server 3.0, WSO2 Business Rules Server 2.0, WSO2 Business Activity Monitor 2.0, WSO2 Message Broker 2.0, WSO2 Complex Event Processing Server 2.0, WSO2 Elastic Load Balancer 2.0, and WSO2 Gadget Server 2.0 (gadget-based portal server).

The inherent multi-tenancy now available within the Carbon core allows organizations to manage isolation between departments, partners or simply between separate development groups. Additionally, it enables organizations to build software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The result is that organizations have much a wider choice in how they implement multi-tenancy, and they can now choose to use multi-tenancy with or without running the software on cloud infrastructure.

Other new important capabilities are also targeted at large-scale deployment, including improved capabilities around large clusters and high scalability, separation of management and worker nodes, and enhanced deployment synchronization of code. Also enabled is support for the Java Developer Kit (JDK) 1.7 and the Equinox 3.7 software developer kit (SDK) for OSGi.

Elastic Load Balancing and Auto-Scaling On-Premise and in the Cloud
The WSO2 Elastic Load Balancer (WSO2 ELB) offers a lean approach to balance loads across WSO2 service instances on-premise or in the cloud. It provides multi-tenancy, fail-over, and auto-scaling of services in line with dynamically changing load characteristics. Version 1.0 of WSO2 ELB was launched in 2011 as functionality within the WSO2 Carbon core framework and WSO2 Stratos 1.5. With the new Version 2.0, WSO2 ELB is a full, separately downloadable product. WSO2 ELB 2.0 also adds several new capabilities, including:
• Tenant-aware and service-aware load balancing provides a scalable approach for balancing the load across a set of tenants sharing a collection of worker nodes, and it enables balancing across shared service clusters or different service clusters.
• Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) independent elasticity supports widely adopted platforms, such as Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, OpenStack, and VMware ESX.
• Cloud bursting to hybrid clouds lets enterprises extend their data center’s processing capabilities by leveraging the compute power available on public clouds, such as Amazon EC2. Bursting can span across public and private clouds using different IaaS providers at the same time.
• Elastic scaling of worker nodes makes it possible to start or terminate nodes based on need; scaling can occur simultaneously across multiple underlying IaaS.
• “Private jet” mode for tenants allows some tenants to deploy in a single-tenant mode; clusters are isolated for special privileges, such as priority processing, user-based customized actions, and improved performance.
• Dynamic Discovery allows WSO2 ESB to dynamically discover worker nodes, add or remove nodes without restarting the system, and add or remove entire clusters dynamically.

High Availability and Big Data Support
The newest releases of the WSO2 Message Broker and WSO2 Complex Event Processing Server (WSO2 CEP Server) complement the recently launched WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM) 2.0 to support the high volume, high availability, big data demands of the cloud.

WSO2 Message Broker 2.0 is now the industry’s only open source big data message broker, utilizing Apache Hadoop to provide backend storage that can scale dynamically and elastically. Version 2.0 also adds high availability (HA) support with a complete hot-to-hot continuous availability mode, the ability to scale up to several servers in a cluster, and no single point of failure. Featuring a re-architected core for high scalability and performance, WSO2 Message Broker 2.0 is designed to manage persistent messaging and large numbers of queues, subscribers and messages.

WSO2 CEP Server 2.0 features a new CEP engine, named Siddhi, which runs up to 10x faster than the previous open source engine. Support for clustering and the high-performance Apache Thrift transport also significantly enhance the newest release’s performance. Notably, WSO2 CEP Server 2.0 can work with WSO2 BAM 2.0—which supports Apache Thrift, Apache Cassandra and Apache Hadoop—to perform real-time analytics on big data and gain visibility into up-to-the-minute trends. (For more information on WSO2 BAM 2.0, see the release dated September 18, 2012).

Cloud and Web Integration
Central to cloud and Web integration are the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB) and WSO2 Governance Registry.

WSO2 ESB 4.5 features a new approach to enable mediation libraries, which allow WSO2, as well as customers and partners, to quickly plug in adapters for cloud- and Web-based systems. With this release, WSO2 is introducing new adaptors for SugarCRM, Twitter, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn and other cloud systems. Other enhancements include integration of WSO2’s SAP adaptor into WSO2 ESB 4.5, support for Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) to facilitate interoperability with .NET, enhanced REST and mobile support with JSON streaming, enhanced performance, and improved API handling.

Governance Registry 4.5 adds integration with GitHub, the popular Web-based hosting service for software development projects. Also included is integration with the popular Apache Subversion (SVN) code repository. It also offers a new lifecycle audit function to produce a log of what has occurred, enhanced usability and manageability, and risk and compliance capabilities.

Enhanced Cloud Security with WSO2 Identity Server
WSO2 Identity Server 4.0 adds Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM) support for identity provisioning to facilitate user management operations across SaaS applications. Additionally, the latest version features federated identity provider (IdP) functionality, which allows different organizations to make shared services available—for example different universities sharing certain resources with each other’s faculty or students—while enabling single sign-on simplicity for end users. Such federated IdP is particularly important for facilitating authentication across extremely large deployments associated with the cloud.

WSO2 Identity Server is complemented by the WSO2 Cloud Gateway 1.0, first launched in 2010, which provides a secure connection between applications behind the firewall and public PaaS or SaaS offerings.

Application Manager Expands Tomcat 7 and JavaScript Support
With Version 5.0, WSO2 Application Server absorbs all of the capabilities of the WSO2 Mashup Server, enabling JavaScript authors to consume, compose and emit Web services, feeds, scraped Web pages, email, and instant messages. It also supports the Apache CXF open source services framework, which facilitates the ability to port Tomcat 7 on top. Additionally, WSO2 Application Server 5.0 supports Jaggery, the open source JavaScript server-side scripting engine, which combines the strength of JavaScript with the flexibility and freedom of PHP-like scripting environments. With Jaggery, developers can use JavaScript to write all parts of Web applications and services, reducing or eliminating conversion mismatches across the different layers of the Web application and API development experience.

PaaS Deployments with WSO2 Stratos 1.6 and WSO2 StratosLive
The Java-based WSO2 Stratos 1.6 cloud middleware platform provides all of the features required to support robust cloud-native deployments of applications, services and processes in a private PaaS deployment. These include multi-tenancy, automatic metering and monitoring, auto-scaling, centralized governance and identity management, and single sign-on. The Cloud Manager in WSO2 Stratos 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.

With Version 1.6, WSO2 Stratos discontinues the inclusion WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware services. Instead, WSO2 Stratos runs all 13 WSO2 Carbon 4.0-based cloud-ready middleware products to enable seamless deployment on-premise and in the cloud. In addition to basic auto-scaling functionality available through an auto-service call to Amazon EC2, WSO2 Stratos 1.6 also provides robust auto-scaling when combined with the WSO2 Elastic Load Balancer 2.0.

WSO2 StratoLive provides a public PaaS option for enterprises that don’t want to implement their own IaaS and PaaS infrastructure. The newest release of StratosLive is hosted by WSO2 and powered by WSO2 Stratos 1.6 and the 13 WSO2 Carbon 4.0-based middleware products.

Availability and Support
WSO2 Carbon 4.0, WSO2 Stratos 1.6, and WSO2 StratosLive are in production and available today. As fully open source solutions released under the Apache License 2.0, they do not carry any licensing fees. Production support starts at $10,000 per server instance per year for WSO2 Carbon middleware and $30,000 per year for each WSO2 Stratos installation. The WSO2 StratosLive middleware PaaS is backed by a standard service-level agreement and is available at three paid subscription levels: SMB, Professional and Enterprise, as well as a free Demo subscription. For details on subscription pricing, visit http://wso2.com/cloud/stratoslive.

WSO2 Carbon 4.0, WSO2 Stratos 1.6, and WSO2 StratosLive are 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. In addition to production support, WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, development support, and special QuickStart consulting programs.