Conundrum

In my previous post, Portals and Mashups in the Cloud , I described an ecosystem that can be deployed either in your data centre or in the cloud. An ecosystem such as above will allow enterprises to do two important things; Expose APIs for third party mashup/gadget developers to utilise in their apps Maintain a repository where business users can visit, browse and select apps from. These apps run in their personal portal pages. Within that post lies the fundamentals of an Enterprise App Store . What is an enterprise app store? Well, in the mobile device world of iPhones, Androids and Symbians, we all use an app store at one point or the other. Whether it's iTunes, The Android Market Place or Nokia's OVI Store, we all visit them and they provide one significant benefit in general. We get to personalise our device with the applications we need. We get to build, at a software level, a phone that is optimised for our day-to-day use, without being programmers. We also get to influen

A few days ago Azeez, the senior architect behind WSO2 Stratos wrote a detailed post about its deployment architecture. He tells the story of how we migrated our carbon product stack to the cloud-native platform that we named WSO2 Stratos. So what does the future hold for portal and mashup developers? How will Stratos change our lives? As you can see the WSO2 Mashup Server and WSO2 Gadget Server are also deployed in Stratos as cloud-native services. This means that organisations will be able to deploy highly scalable, highly available, distributed applications with ease. And they will be far less expensive than today with a granular, pay-as-you-go model. This is good news for mashup developers because now we can re-use code and services in a massive scale without an exponential increase in infrastructure costs as our mashups become popular. For instance, imagine that you have a mashup and plan to sell it as a service. The old model would demand that you invest heavily on servers an

What's Stratos ? It's the cloud-native version of WSO2's award winning Carbon Platform. I emphasised cloud-native because there's a difference between that and just deploying a web application to a service like Amazon EC2. Cloud-native implies five things ... Elasticity : Stratos manages your underlying cloud infrastructure to seamlessly handle the scalability demands of your application. Multi-tenancy : Departments, developer groups, or projects run fully independently, but share the same middleware platform for maximum resource utilization. Billing and Metering : Each tenant can meter their actual resource use for internal billing purposes. Self Provisioning : Authorized users can provision new tenants from a web portal in moments. Dynamic Discovery : Linking up services that reside in a dynamic and elastic environment can be tricky but Stratos simplifies and automates this process with standards-based service discovery and automatic configuration capabilities. I