WSO2 Stratos 1.0.0 Released!

Written by Sami

WSO2 Stratos team is pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.0 WSO2 Stratos.

WSO2 Stratos is a complete middleware platform-as-a-service for implementing an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA). WSO2 Stratos is 100% open source and is available under Apache License v2.0. It is built on top of, and extends, WSO2 Carbon, the award-winning, comprehensive, concise, lean enterprise middleware platform.

WSO2 Stratos 1.0.0 release is available for download at http://wso2.org/downloads/stratos

WSO2 Platform as a Service 1.0.0 Beta is readily available for access at https://cloud.wso2.com. This is a hosted version of WSO2 Stratos 1.0.0 currently in beta status where customers can register and use all the middleware services without having to deploy any software.

With WSO2 Stratos, IT professionals have a fully hosted platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for rapidly building and deploying services and composite applications, with instant provisioning capability. WSO2 Stratos 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 is equipped with features for auto-scaling and single sign-on, as well as enhanced functionality for automatic activity monitoring, usage metering, centralized governance and identity management.

WSO2 Stratos offers all the benefits of the cloud without the complexity or fear of vendor lock-in.

• It is integrated across multiple middleware platform services and provides unified interfaces across services; hence facilitate shorter project times
• Metering reduce costs by allowing monitoring that lead to optimizing data center utilization and allowing companies to pay only for what they use
• Auto-scaling provides the ability to scale up or down based on the demand for services and usage capacity, eliminating both resource starvation as well as resource slack
• Multi-tenancy means applications supporting different organizations, business units or regional offices can be delivered cost-effectively from a single location sharing the same platform and resources, yet run fully independently
• Built-in automated governance and centralized identity management facilitates control over applications and services across different tenants.
• WSO2 Stratos is based on the comprehensive WSO2 Carbon middleware platform, hence, 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.

WSO2 Stratos comes with all of the production-quality runtime engines in WSO2 Carbon available as cloud services:

• WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus as a Service
• WSO2 Application Server as a Service
• WSO2 Data as a Service
• WSO2 Governance as a Service
• WSO2 Identity as a Service
• WSO2 Business Activity Monitoring as a Service
• WSO2 Business Processes as a Service
• WSO2 Business Rules as a Service
• WSO2 Mashups as a Service
• WSO2 Gadgets as a Service

WSO2 Stratos Features

At the heart of the WSO2 Stratos Platform as a Service is a cloud manager. This PaaS home service provides management and monitoring capabilities and offers a Web portal where users can register their domains (tenants), log in, manage their accounts, manage users and roles, and activate/deactivate the middleware services that are available for their users.

The PaaS home offers point-and-click simplicity for provisioning middleware services, so developers can get started immediately and focus on the business logic, rather than configuring and deploying software systems.

The platform 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.

Once WSO2 Stratos is installed, a Web-based management portal lets users configure, manage and govern independent-but-consistent services 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, metered and billed according to use.

Noteworthy WSO2 Stratos features include:

• Auto-scaling capabilities: WSO2 Stratos automatically adjusts the use of cloud resources to meet increased or decreased demand.
• 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 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 automated so that every operation by tenant users will be monitored and recorded. The metering information can be used for billing and for offering constrained access for certain services.
• Enhanced centralized governance and identity management: All the resources of all Stratos services can be monitored and governed from a single point - from WSO2 Stratos Governance as a Service. When a modification, such as changing a security policy, or changing the keystore, is done from a single place, it is immediately visible to all other services. In addition, all services share a single user store. When a user is added from a service, that new user can immediately access all other services available for the tenant.

Support

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, CloudStart(SM) consulting program, development support and production support.

For additional support information please visit http://wso2.com/support/ .

WSO2 Stratos Team

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WSO2Con Colombo 2010 Day 1 -About to Start

Written by Sami

We are all set to get going with WSO2Con 2010 here in Colombo.

I am all ready with my presentation and the folks are sly ready with the carbon demo.

Looking forward to an exiting two days!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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WSO2Con Day 2

Written by Sami

We are about to start day two of WSO2Con here in Colombo.

Yesterday it was the day of the platform. We not only talked about it, but also demoed the complete platform with a sample applications.

Today it is going to be the day on PaaS. We will talk as well as demo the cloud platform.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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Cloud and the future of computing

Written by Sami

10 years ago, hosted mail solutions like Gmail, or Yahoo mail were treated like toys. Businesses, small and big, had to host their own mail servers. And in addition to the core business, there were people in IT, or some engineers who were willing to multi-task, had to look after the mail server. Including running the mail server, maintaining DNS MX records, configuring the mail server, maintaining the hardware etc. Such was the "do it all ourselves" era of computing.

Today, not many organizations host their own mail servers. Specially those small to medium businesses. You rather buy the service from a service provider, and all that the organization has to do is to create/delete/update mail accounts. All the burden of running the mail service has been handed over to the service providers. Such is the "service" era of computing.

Though cloud is deemed to be a "hype" thing, it really is not. It is there already and people use it for real business. We have been using the "cloud" model for Web hosting for more than a decade. More and more apps are "out there" rather than in-house. Such is the "cloud" nature of computing today.

Almost everyone, except may be the poorest in the world, has a bank account. We own the money, but the responsibility of keeping the money is "outsourced" to the bank. It gives us peace of mind, rather than having sacks of cash notes under our bed. The idea of cloud computing is similar. You own it, but it is managed and kept by someone else. If you are not using it, someone else can use it, and you do not have to pay. And you save, like earning interest on the money deposited in the bank. And you do not have the burden of acquiring hardware, maintaining software and the like.

So we are moving to a centralized model back again? Yes, sort of. Is that not risky? Well, is that not risky to have everyone's money in a single bank? We have established our "trust" with banking systems. Similarly we would learn to trust cloud providers.

To start with, we had the software as a service model. Then we saw Amazon offering hardware, computing power, as a service with EC2. We also have middleware as a service being offered, for e.g. by WSO2.

So, hardware, middleware and software are all available as services with the cloud model.

So your ESB will be on the cloud, and you will mediate your SOA messaging though that. You will have your business process modelling tools on the cloud. You will have your identity provider on the cloud. It will soon become like your email. Your middleware and your enterprise apps will run out there on the cloud. You will not have to have room for a server room anymore.

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Self Service Computing with Cloud for Middleware

Written by Sami

We go to the ATM nowadays than to the bank counter for our banking needs. And some even use the Internet banking more than the ATM. Self service models revolutionized the services sector, with 24/7/365 access to services.

The same self service models are made possible for IT operations in enterprises, thanks to the cloud technologies. If one wanted a new machine even for testing or trying out something , with some software configuration, it used to take weeks if not months, for that request to be serviced by IT departments. But now, it can be made available within few minutes, thanks to cloud computing. One can go to Amazon EC2, and get a powerful machine instance, and it will take less than five minutes, it is up and running and is ready to use. And it is quite like the ATM model. It is self service and fully automated.

Not only for infrastructure facilities where you are looking for processing power with some operating system, but also for situations where you want a machine with service hosting capabilities to test and try out a new service implementation, this is possible. In other words, platforms are available as services. And with zero installation time and zero configuration time, you are ready to use a middleware stack, on the cloud. If you are a developer, you might know, how long it would have taken to download (provided it is open source, of-course) or purchase a middleware stack, install and configure prior to using the setup at all to implement and try something out. Cloud computing can revolutionize this model and expedite it to a great deal, in that, the only thing that the developer has to do is to sing in for an account, and then use the middleware platform services.

What would be the ingredients of a middleware platform as a service setup?

Service hosting, data services, governance, identity management, enterprise service bus, business process management tools, rules services, mashups, portals/dashboards and business activity monitoring can all be part of a platform as a service offering.

Not only developers, but also IT specialists as well as business specialists can benefit from such a cloud based model for middleware. Developers can develop, test and deploy in quick time. IT folks can easily enforce policies with governance, monitor setup with monitoring and tune deployments with portals. Business folks can model business process, monitor and tune business processes with business rules. All parties in the enterprise can focus on the core business aspects, without having to worry about things such as computing capacity, version incompatibilities among different elements, and maintenance headaches. Technologies such as auto scaling will take care of computing capacity. The cloud vendor will take care of maintaining middleware setup and software versions. It is like Facebook for middleware.

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Cloud Computing & Governance - It just got easier

Written by Sami

Governance is key, for successful and effective IT operations.

People, policies and processes are the key dimensions in governance. Those dimensions, combined with service life-cycle models, forms the basis for SOA governance today.

How does cloud computing help with Governance? Well the trivial answer is to say that, lets make governance available as a service. That could be a big chunk in governance in cloud era, but that alone is not it.

To start simple, the cloud self service models will allow faster provisioning cycles to that the developers/testers that are involved with service life-cycles can be more productive with delivering services.

For example, say that we have a simple service life-cycle:

design <-> implement <-> test <-> stage <-> deploy

Now, when going though the life-cycle of a service, people involved require various resources. For example, the developer need to have a setup to do unit tests during implementation phase. And the resources for testing could be allocated from the application server as a service, rather than having to have dedicated machine and have the trouble of installing and configuring the application server. The developer can use his or her own tenant to develop and test his code, without having to trouble anyone or block anyone.

When the service goes to testing phase, again the quality assurance people can drop the service into their own tenant space, where they have all dependencies, contexts and environments pre-setup and test in quick time. Again no setup time, not installation of app servers and no need to have dedicated hardware.

When the service moves along the life-cycle, so does the resource requirements by various team members and the on-damed resource provisioning of the cloud can cater to all time based demand by various sub teams as opposed to dedicated resources for each sub team.

Thus, cloud naturally fits into SOA governance needs and saves both time and money.

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Hands on CLOUD while legs on EARTH

1. Sign up for S3

Go to http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ and sign up for an Amazon S3 account.

Amazon S3 is storage on cloud.It provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data.

Read more on S3 from http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/

2. Tools

Once you created the storage on cloud - there are tools which let you talk to the S3 iterface from your local computer.

CloudBerry Explorer is the one I use, it makes managing files in Amazon S3 storage EASY. By providing a user interface to Amazon S3 accounts, files, and buckets, CloudBerry lets you manage your files on cloud just as you would on your own local computer.

3. S3 with CloudBerry Explorer

Start CloudBerry Explorer --> File --> Amazon S3 Account --> New Account

Here you need to provide, an Access Key, a Secret Key and a Display. Make sure you tick the 'Use SSL' tick box.

To find your Access Key and the Secret Key - first you need to login to http://aws.amazon.com/account/ with your Amazon credentials and click on the link for 'Security Credentials'

Once you are there you can see both your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key listed under Access Keys.

Copy thoe keys from there and give those to CloudBerry Explorer.

Once you create the new account in CloudBerry Explorer - it will be listed under 'Source'.

Select your account from 'Source' - CloudBerry Explorer will talk to your S3 account and will display the buckets you created.

4. Buckets

Just like a bucket holds water, Amazon buckets are like a container for your files. You can name your buckets the way you like but it should be unique across the Amazon system.

To create a Bucket from CloudBerry - click the 'New Bucket' icon in blue on the top row.

Amazon S3 offers storage in the United States and in Europe (within the EU). You can specify where you want to store your data when you create your Amazon S3 buckets.

Keep in mind that the bucket namespace is shared by all users of the system. So the name you give needs to be unique accross the system.

Once you created the bucket - that will be displayed in the left pane of the CloudBerry Explorer.

Right click on the bucket and select 'Web URL' - that will show the web url to access your bucket [e.g. http://facilelogin.s3.amazonaws.com/]

Type that on a web browser and try to access it - you won't be.

Now you need to set the access control setting for your bucket.

Once again right click on the bucket and select ACL and then ACL Settings.

If yu want all the users to have read access to your bucket - then select 'All Users' and set 'Read' permission.

Now - try to access the link from the web browser.

To move data from your local machine to the S3 bucket in the cloud - just drag and drop the files from the right pane to the S3 bucket on the left pane.

5. Sign up for EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud.

Go to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ and sign up for an EC2 acount. You can use same Amazon credentials you used to create the S3 accont.

Read more on EC2 from http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/

6. Amazon Management console

Now, go to htp://aws.amazon.com/console/ - select EC2 from right hand side combo box and 'Sign in to the AWS Console'.

The AWS Management Console gives you a quick, global picture of your cloud computing environment so that you can see what resources you’re operating and conveniently manage those resources

7. Starting an EC2 instance

Once you sign in to the Amazon Management console, you will see a dashboard.

To start using Amazon EC2 you will want to launch a virtual server, known as an Amazon EC2 instance.

Click on the link 'Launch Instances'.

Now - this will display a set of available AMI(Amazon Machine Image)s.

Select any AMI you want - I selected 'Basic Fedora Core 8'.

In the next screen - set the number of instances as - 1.

Select create new key pair.

Public/private key pairs allow you to securely connect to your instance after it launches. To create a key pair, enter a name and click Create & Download your Key Pair.

You will then be prompted to save the private key to your computer. Note, you only need to generate a key pair once — not each time you want to deploy an Amazon EC2 instance.

Let's also create a new security group - accept the default settings there only giving access to SSH port.

Security groups determine whether a network port is open or blocked on your instance(s).

Once you are done with all tha - you'll be back on the dashboard and under 'Instances' - you can see the instance you started now.

Click on that instance and you'll see all the details about it listed down - and copy the Public DNS value[e.g: ec2-75-101-193-101.compute-1.amazonaws.com]

Now - you have a Fedora instance running on the cloud.

Let's see how to login in to it from the local machine.

8. Putty

I am using Putty under Windows, to SSH in to my Fedora instance running on the cloud.

First we need to setup the private key with it. [Rember we download a key while launching the AMI].

Start Putty --> Session --> Set Host Name - the Public DNS of our running Fedora instance.

Go to Connection/SSH/Auth - set the private key file for authentication.

Here it requires the private key in PPK format - but what we downloaded is in PEM format.

Now we need to do a conversion - we can use puttygen for that.

Once done set the PPK file as the private key file for authentication in Putty.

Now, go to Connection/Data - set 'root' as the Auto-login user name.

Now - we are done - click on 'Open' to connect to your Fedora instance running on EC2.

9. Launching a Windows Instance

Hear we try to launch a Windows Instance and try to remote login in to it.

Before launching a Windows AMI - let's first create new Security Group.

From the main dashboard - you can select 'Security Groups' and then create a new secuirty group.

Once created - allow RDP connection for this security group - to allow windows remote login.

Now - in the same way we did before - launch a Windows AMI - but make sure you set it's security group - the one we just created with RDP connections allowed.

To get the Windows admin password to login through remote login - highlight the Windows instance from Dashboard/Instances - select Instance Actions/Windows Actions/Get Windows Admin Password.

See original post

Cloud Computing & Governance - It just got easier

Written by Sami

Governance is key, for successful and effective IT operations.

People, policies and processes are the key dimensions in governance. Those dimensions, combined with service life-cycle models, forms the basis for SOA governance today.

How does cloud computing help with Governance? Well the trivial answer is to say that, lets make governance available as a service. That could be a big chunk in governance in cloud era, but that alone is not it.

To start simple, the cloud self service models will allow faster provisioning cycles to that the developers/testers that are involved with service life-cycles can be more productive with delivering services.

For example, say that we have a simple service life-cycle:

design <-> implement <-> test <-> stage <-> deploy

Now, when going though the life-cycle of a service, people involved require various resources. For example, the developer need to have a setup to do unit tests during implementation phase. And the resources for testing could be allocated from the application server as a service, rather than having to have dedicated machine and have the trouble of installing and configuring the application server. The developer can use his or her own tenant to develop and test his code, without having to trouble anyone or block anyone.

When the service goes to testing phase, again the quality assurance people can drop the service into their own tenant space, where they have all dependencies, contexts and environments pre-setup and test in quick time. Again no setup time, not installation of app servers and no need to have dedicated hardware.

When the service moves along the life-cycle, so does the resource requirements by various team members and the on-damed resource provisioning of the cloud can cater to all time based demand by various sub teams as opposed to dedicated resources for each sub team.

Thus, cloud naturally fits into SOA governance needs and saves both time and money.

See original post

Self Service Computing with Cloud for Middleware

Written by Sami

We go to the ATM nowadays than to the bank counter for our banking needs. And some even use the Internet banking more than the ATM. Self service models revolutionized the services sector, with 24/7/365 access to services.

The same self service models are made possible for IT operations in enterprises, thanks to the cloud technologies. If one wanted a new machine even for testing or trying out something , with some software configuration, it used to take weeks if not months, for that request to be serviced by IT departments. But now, it can be made available within few minutes, thanks to cloud computing. One can go to Amazon EC2, and get a powerful machine instance, and it will take less than five minutes, it is up and running and is ready to use. And it is quite like the ATM model. It is self service and fully automated.

Not only for infrastructure facilities where you are looking for processing power with some operating system, but also for situations where you want a machine with service hosting capabilities to test and try out a new service implementation, this is possible. In other words, platforms are available as services. And with zero installation time and zero configuration time, you are ready to use a middleware stack, on the cloud. If you are a developer, you might know, how long it would have taken to download (provided it is open source, of-course) or purchase a middleware stack, install and configure prior to using the setup at all to implement and try something out. Cloud computing can revolutionize this model and expedite it to a great deal, in that, the only thing that the developer has to do is to sing in for an account, and then use the middleware platform services.

What would be the ingredients of a middleware platform as a service setup?

Service hosting, data services, governance, identity management, enterprise service bus, business process management tools, rules services, mashups, portals/dashboards and business activity monitoring can all be part of a platform as a service offering.

Not only developers, but also IT specialists as well as business specialists can benefit from such a cloud based model for middleware. Developers can develop, test and deploy in quick time. IT folks can easily enforce policies with governance, monitor setup with monitoring and tune deployments with portals. Business folks can model business process, monitor and tune business processes with business rules. All parties in the enterprise can focus on the core business aspects, without having to worry about things such as computing capacity, version incompatibilities among different elements, and maintenance headaches. Technologies such as auto scaling will take care of computing capacity. The cloud vendor will take care of maintaining middleware setup and software versions. It is like Facebook for middleware.

See original post

Cloud and the future of computing

Written by Sami

10 years ago, hosted mail solutions like Gmail, or Yahoo mail were treated like toys. Businesses, small and big, had to host their own mail servers. And in addition to the core business, there were people in IT, or some engineers who were willing to multi-task, had to look after the mail server. Including running the mail server, maintaining DNS MX records, configuring the mail server, maintaining the hardware etc. Such was the "do it all ourselves" era of computing.

Today, not many organizations host their own mail servers. Specially those small to medium businesses. You rather buy the service from a service provider, and all that the organization has to do is to create/delete/update mail accounts. All the burden of running the mail service has been handed over to the service providers. Such is the "service" era of computing.

Though cloud is deemed to be a "hype" thing, it really is not. It is there already and people use it for real business. We have been using the "cloud" model for Web hosting for more than a decade. More and more apps are "out there" rather than in-house. Such is the "cloud" nature of computing today.

Almost everyone, except may be the poorest in the world, has a bank account. We own the money, but the responsibility of keeping the money is "outsourced" to the bank. It gives us peace of mind, rather than having sacks of cash notes under our bed. The idea of cloud computing is similar. You own it, but it is managed and kept by someone else. If you are not using it, someone else can use it, and you do not have to pay. And you save, like earning interest on the money deposited in the bank. And you do not have the burden of acquiring hardware, maintaining software and the like.

So we are moving to a centralized model back again? Yes, sort of. Is that not risky? Well, is that not risky to have everyone's money in a single bank? We have established our "trust" with banking systems. Similarly we would learn to trust cloud providers.

To start with, we had the software as a service model. Then we saw Amazon offering hardware, computing power, as a service with EC2. We also have middleware as a service being offered, for e.g. by WSO2.

So, hardware, middleware and software are all available as services with the cloud model.

So your ESB will be on the cloud, and you will mediate your SOA messaging though that. You will have your business process modelling tools on the cloud. You will have your identity provider on the cloud. It will soon become like your email. Your middleware and your enterprise apps will run out there on the cloud. You will not have to have room for a server room anymore.

See original post

WSO2Con Day 2

Written by Sami

We are about to start day two of WSO2Con here in Colombo.

Yesterday it was the day of the platform. We not only talked about it, but also demoed the complete platform with a sample applications.

Today it is going to be the day on PaaS. We will talk as well as demo the cloud platform.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

See original post

WSO2Con Colombo 2010 Day 1 -About to Start

Written by Sami

We are all set to get going with WSO2Con 2010 here in Colombo.

I am all ready with my presentation and the folks are sly ready with the carbon demo.

Looking forward to an exiting two days!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

See original post

WSO2Con 2010 Colombo

Written by Sami

The first ever WSO2 Conference on SOA and Cloud Technologies will be held in Colombo from 14th to 15th September 2010.

WSO2 has played a major role in redefining the enterprise computing space. Come and learn the state of the art technologies, techniques, architecture patterns in the enterprise computing space. Come, learn and envision the future enterprise computing.

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