WSO2 today announced the debut of WSO2 Stratos, the first 100% open source cloud platform for enterprise applications. WSO2 Stratos offers organizations of all sizes a fully hosted application platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Using WSO2 Stratos, IT professionals can build and deploy applications and services with instant provisioning of enterprise servers, including the portal, enterprise service bus (ESB), and application server. WSO2 Stratos is built on top of and extends WSO2 Carbon-the award-winning, OSGi-compliant middleware.

    "WSO2 Stratos provides a complete middleware platform for delivering robust applications on private clouds, as well as migrating between and integrating with public clouds and on-premise systems-and there's never cloud lock-in."

With this announcement, WSO2 enters the emerging market for enterprise PaaS. WSO2 Stratos provides IT organizations with three key benefits:

    * Productivity: cut project time using the automated, integrated and highly scalable infrastructure of WSO2 Stratos.
    * Cost reduction: optimize datacenter utilization and pay only for what is actually used.
    * Control: govern all applications and services with built-in governance automation.

Because WSO2 Stratos is based on the open source WSO2 Carbon, applications can be migrated on premise, to a private cloud or to the public cloud. Not only does this provide unprecedented deployment flexibility, but for the first time, enterprises can smoothly and safely migrate to the cloud-without the complexity or fear of vendor lock-in.

WSO2 Stratos goes far beyond basic application frameworks to provide an enterprise cloud platform, which manages and deploys key services based on WSO2's production-quality runtime engines including:

    * ESB (based on WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus)
    * Portals (based on WSO2 Gadget Server)
    * Web applications and services (based on WSO2 Web Services Application Server)
    * Identity management (based on WSO2 Identity Server)
    * Governance and registry (based on WSO2 Governance Registry)

"At a time when IT developers can create a new application in one month, taking months to provision and deploy servers and systems no longer makes strategic or economic sense," said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. "WSO2 Stratos provides a complete middleware platform for delivering robust applications on private clouds, as well as migrating between and integrating with public clouds and on-premise systems-and there's never cloud lock-in."

WSO2 Stratos Cloud-Native Platform

WSO2 Stratos, through its integration layer, installs onto any existing cloud infrastructure such as Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), and VMware ESX, to name a few. Enterprises are never locked into a specific infrastructure provider or platform. Once WSO2 Stratos is installed, users get a Web-based management portal where they can configure, manage and govern independent but consistent servers for each department, or for each stage of a system's lifecycle. Each server is completely virtual, scaling up automatically to handle the required load, and metered and billed according to use.

WSO2 Stratos enables IT teams to create, manage and run enterprise-class applications and services with all the inherent benefits of a true cloud-native environment:

    * Elasticity: infrastructure usage scales up and down based on usage.
    * Multi-tenancy: applications supporting different business units or regional offices can be delivered cost-effectively from a single location.
    * Billing, metering, and flexible monitoring: users control and pay only for what they use.
    * Self-provisioning and management: results in a near-zero time delay between developing applications and deploying them out to users.
    * Dynamic, just-in-time discovery and wiring: the virtualized infrastructure can be flexibly and even partially moved across servers, private and public clouds.
    * Incremental deployment and testing: supports continuous updates, side-by-side operation, in-place testing, and incremental production.

At the heart of the WSO2 Stratos PaaS is a Cloud Manager. This server manages all other services and offers a portal 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, not waste time configuring and deploying software systems.

WSO2 CloudStart Program

In conjunction with WSO2 Stratos, WSO2 is launching its new CloudStartSM Program. The service, 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 infrastructure. Working hand-in-hand with the customer development team, the WSO2 experts build a lightweight implementation or proof-of-concept. They then follow up the onsite engagement with offsite development support. The CloudStart Program is based on the highly successful QuickStartSM Program, which has helped many enterprises demonstrate the utility and cost-effectiveness of the WSO2 platform.
 

Availability and Support

WSO2 Stratos is available today 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. As a fully open source solution WSO2 Stratos does not require any licensing fees. WSO2 offers a range of additional service and support options, including evaluation support, the CloudStart and QuickStart consulting programs, development support, and production support.