StratosLive - A case study for WSO2 Load Balancer

In a cloud environment such as WSO2 StratosLive, auto-scaling becomes a crucial functionality. The system is expected to scale up and down with the dynamically changing load. Auto-scaling capabilities are sometimes provided by the Infrastructure as a Service provider themselves, such as the Autoscaling from Amazon. However, autoscaling is not necessarily a requirement that to be fulfilled by an IaaS. Say, you are providing Platform as a Service (PaaS) that is hosted over the pure native hardware, instead of an IaaS. In that case, your PaaS should be able to provide the required autoscaling and load balancing capabilities to the applications that are hosted on top of your platform. WSO2 Load Balancer is such a software load balancer, that handles the load balancing, fail over, and autoscaling functionalities.

WSO2 Load Balancer is used in production as a dynamic load balancer and autoscaler, as a complete software load balancer product. It is a stripped down version of WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus, containing only the components that are required for load balancing. WSO2 StratosLive can be considered a user scenario with WSO2 Load Balancer in production.

Multiple service groups are proxied by WSO2 Load Balancers. Some of the services have more than one instances to start with, to withstand the higher load. The system automatically scales according to the load that goes high and low. WSO2 Load Balancer is configured such that the permanent or the initial nodes are not terminated when the load goes high. The nodes that are spawned by the load balancer to handle the higher load will be terminated, when the load goes low. Hence, it becomes possible to have different services to run on a single instance, for the instances that are 'permanent', while the spawned instances will have a single carbon server instance.

WSO2 StratosLive ~ An Enterprise Ready Java PaaS - II

We looked into WSO2 StratosLive and registered a tenant in the first part of this series of blog posts. Read the first post in WSO2 StratosLive - An Enterprise Ready Java PaaS, if you have missed it. We have seen how the WSO2 Carbon based products are offered as Services in WSO2 Stratos. In simpler terms, we have a platform - that is Carbon, which is offered as a Platform as a Service. 

   

New Services

WSO2 Complex Event Processing as a Service and WSO2 Message Broker as a Service are two new services that are included into StratosLive with this new release. 

What is New?

Better metered and billing support to throttle the usage based on the tenant usage plan.

Tenant and service aware distributed logging that enables the tenants to view their logs only for each of the services, along with the global logging for super tenants

Cloud Services Gateway

  

Fig 1. Installing the shopping cart sample.

HTTPD style log collection for the WSO2 Load Balancer - Hence the removal of the apache httpd servers fronting the Stratos services.

Integrated samples, improved documentation and the screencasts.

Tenant data storage mode - Scaling up databases, and NoSQL. 

SaaS web applications support.

Registry based repository implementation based on registry eventing.

Fig 2. Shopping Cart Sample High Level Diagram

Versioning and incremental updates.

Tenant programming model & documentation. 

Google auth integration.

The All New WSO2 Load Balancer fronting the services handling the load balancing and the autoscaling of the system according to the load.

These are a few notable improvements, new features, or additions into StratosLive (based on Stratos-1.5.1), from its predecessor WSO2 Cloud Services (based on Stratos-1.0.0).

Shopping Cart Sample

Fig 3. Solution Architecture of Shopping Cart App

We often use Shopping Cart Sample that comes bundled with Stratos, for the tenants to install and use, to explain the platform aspect of Stratos. Shopping Cart sample is one of the simplest samples that explains how Stratos can be used as a platform solution for your Software as a Service needs, as the shopping cart sample can be considered an application as a service that runs on top of the Stratos platform as a service, giving an essence of the Stratos Services.

For a detailed discussion on the solution architecture of the Shopping Cart Sample and the overall platform aspect of StratosLive PaaS, pls refer to the post the follows WSO2 StratosLive - An Enterprise Ready Java PaaS - III

WSO2 StratosLive ~ An Enterprise Ready Java PaaS

Fig 1. stratoslive.wso2.com landing page.

What is StratosLive?

StratosLive is a Platform as a Service, which is the public deployment of the WSO2's Cloud Middleware Platform Stratos-1.5.1.

As the successor of WSO2 Stratos - 1.0.0 public cloud set up, WSO2 StratosLive has been released with much new and more improved features, including Billing, throttling, service aware dynamic load balancing, more improved autoscaling, logging, and much more improved user experience, targeting the architects, SaaS developers, enterprises, researchers, and for any one who needs an enterprise SOA middleware platform as a service.

Starting with StratosLive

Fig 2. Sign in page

 You can register a tenant at StratosLive, which includes a free demo, SMB (Small Medium Business), Professional, and Enterprise usage plans based on the needs of your enterprise. Pricing information can be found here. You have to pick a usage plan during the tenant registration. However, you can simply upgrade or downgrade your account based on your requirements later.

You might register a tenant, or login using your Google Apps Account. Let's see how to register a tenant  in StratosLive. 

Registering a tenant

Fig 3. Registering a tenant.

Now let's register a tenant for your organization in StratosLive (Fig 3).  First you have to pick a domain name for your tenant. An admin account will be created along with the tenant creation. Your username will be in the form of admin-name@domain-name. So that should be the username to be used to log in to your account. Pls note, it should not be confused with your email address.

Domain Validation

Fig 4. Domain Validation

If you are the owner or the admin of the domain, you should consider validating the domain during the registration time (Fig 4), such that you can be sure that your tenant will always be associated to your domain, preventing others from claiming your domain. However domain validation is optional, and can be done later, once you have registered and signed in.








Email Validation

Fig 5. Successfully Registered

After giving the information required, you can click 'Submit' to proceed with registering. Once you have successfully registered (Fig 5), a confirmation mail will be sent to the email address provided by you during the registration, within a minute or two.

Click the link provided in the mail. That will confirm your email address and validate your account (Fig 6).  Pls note, unlike the domain validation, email validation is mandatory to log in and use your tenant account in StratosLive. So pls make sure to find the mail and validate your account, soon. If you did not receive the mail, check whether that ended up in the spam folder. If it is not even there, you might consider contacting WSO2 Support or the StratosLive forum.


Logging in

Fig 6. Successfully Validated

Once validated, you can get back to the log in page (Fig 1 / Fig 2) and log in using your username (adminName@domainName) and password.

After logging in, you will be able to see the list of WSO2 Stratos Services, basically the entire Carbon middleware platform as services, from the dashboard of WSO2 Stratos Manager (Fig 7).

StratosLive Manager and Services

Fig 7. StratosLive manager home.

Now you have more to explore. You can always use the services, as you usually do with the Carbon based products, without feeling any change, with the luxury of having it for you free or with the pay-as-you-go model in the clouds, paying only for what you use. You will be able to access your services from anywhere and everywhere, without bothering to take your computer and services with you.

So still reading? Try it yourself! Sign-up an account NOW!



WSO2 Summer School 2011
As usual, this year too, WSO2 had the Summer School, a series of webinar sessions, tailor-made to fit the enterprise architects, CTOs, developers of the cutting edge technologies using SOA middleware, cloud computing, and more. 

• Security policy enforcement for the enterprise
• Identity Management in the Cloud
• End- to-end governance in the enterprise
• Enterprise integration with SAP and WSO2 ESB
• Enterprise Integration with the FIX Protocol 
• Mobile-izing enterprises with the WSO2 Mobile Services Gateway 
• Master Data Management in your SOA
• Platform-as-a-Service: The WSO2 way
• Wrap-up: The Best of Summer School 2011

The Session on WSO2 PaaS

Summer School 2011 session on "Platform-as-a-Service, The WSO2 way" is a useful resource to learn more about StratosLive and PaaS. Listen to the Summer School webinar here. You may download the presentation slides from here.