Virtualization and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) can have some serious drawbacks, especially if each new application requires its own virtual machine, middleware stack, and reserved memory allocation. What is more, these allocations must be made before the application starts doing any useful work, so the overhead for new applications can be significant, and can negate many of the advantages of moving operations to the cloud.
Getting round this issue is the target for middleware vendors WSO2 with its new Stratos Cloud Computing Platform. This is particularly aimed at businesses moving to a private cloud architecture where these issues can make developing new services and applications at least as expensive and time consuming as ever. Stratos aims to make provisioning a typical business application a simple, self-service process. Authorized developers simply log on to the Stratos web portal, request a new middleware application, configure it to the specific needs of the application, and upload the associated services, business processes, and other relevant artifacts.
With the Stratos runtime in place on a private cloud, new applications can be deployed as tenants within the existing cloud-native middleware stack. As a result, there is little or no additional resource overhead generated by a new application. Resources such as processor cycles, memory, and bandwidth are shared by other middleware applications and consumed only when traffic starts flowing through the application. According to the company, As, Stratos can be scaled elastically as an application demands more resources.
The company has also launched a partnership programme aimed at building close relationships with both Systems Integrators and IaaS providers. WS02 sees itself a being a strong candidate for the role of bridge technology between the two, providing the tools needed to allow SI’s to build customer services and applications on top of IaaS-provided private cloud infrastructures.
Through the partnership, WSO2 hopes to provide a fast-track for SIs looking to cloud-enable their customers’ existing applications and services, build and deliver SaaS offerings, or create their own vertical PaaS/SaaS templates that target industry-specific applications and services. From the integrators’ camp, two US-based SIs, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. and WebScience, are the first to join the partnership.
On the IaaS side of the divide early signees for the partnership are Amazon Web Services, where WSO2 is offering the public cloud version of WSO2 Stratos on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud; Canonical Ltd, where the company is offering Stratos on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud as part of WSO2’s CloudStart program; and VMware, where WSO2 is offering Stratos on VMware ESX and VMware vSphere.
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