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Apache makes Stratos PaaS cloud a top-level project

Want a fully open source Platform-as-a-Service cloud framework? Apache's just made Stratos a top-level project.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

Finding an open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud is easy. There's CloudStack, OpenStack, ownCloud, etc., etc., you get the idea. But Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud frameworks don't grow on trees. Now, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has moved Stratos, an open-source PaaS to the status of Top-Level Project.

Stratos-logo

Apache Stratos is a highly-extensible PaaS framework that  can run Apache Tomcat, PHP, and MySQL applications. Apache states that it "can be extended to support many more environments on all major cloud infrastructures. For developers, Stratos provides a cloud-based environment for developing, testing, and running scalable applications. IT providers benefit from high utilization rates, automated resource management, and platform-wide insight including monitoring and billing."

This isn't just an experimental program suitable for the guys and the gals in the server room to play with in their spare time. Apache claims that Statos brings enterprise-grade service, governance, security, and performance to private-, public-, and hybrid clouds.

You don't have to take Apache's word for it. Scott Yow, Cisco's VP of product management, said in a statement, "The successful incubation of Stratos and graduation to an Apache top-level project is a significant step for this project. The addition of the partitioning and complex autoscaling capabilities in Stratos 4.0 are critical to service provider-grade deployments. The disaster recovery and high-availability support provide the foundation for a 99.999-plus percent platform and is a significant improvement to Stratos."

In addition, Apache Stratos is already being used by leading aerospace, telecommunication, and construction organizations. Stratos powers one of the world’s largest aviation companies' digital airline initiative to re-invent supply chain logistics. Leading network infrastructure providers are integrating Apache Stratos to deliver advanced telecommunication services to their client base while maintaining telco-grade reliability and availability under peak load.

Specifically, Stratos brings self-service management, elastic scaling, multi-tenant deployment, usage monitoring, as well as the ability to take any server software to run "as-a-Service" alongside other app containers. Apache Stratos deploys onto IaaS clouds such as Amazon EC2, OpenStack, SUSECloud, VMWare vCloud and others.

Originally developed by WSO2, an open-source middleware company, Stratos entered the Apache Incubator in June 2013. It currently has code contributions from programmers Cisco, Citrix, Indiana University, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory among other organizations.

"Donating Stratos to the Apache Incubator has been a great success, we have added significant new capabilities to the technology and at the same time the community has really grown," said Lakmal Warusawithana, VP of Apache Stratos, and Director of Cloud Architecture at WSO2, in a statement.

With this release, Apache Stratos v4.0, this PaaS also comes with the following new features:

  1. Map into underlying datacenter infrastructure and create policies (called "partitions"): this unique functionality goes beyond other PaaS infrastructures to make Stratos truly enterprise class; 
  2. Plug in third-party load balancers, such as HAProxy, that provide pure TCP load balancing; and 
  3. Support real-time complex event processing for autoscaling: Stratos can take any available data on load and usage including on-VM CPU load, network and memory usage, together with data from the load-balancer and pipe this into a powerful real-time event processing engine. 

Want to see it for yourself? As with all Apache program, Stratos has been released under the Apache License v2.0, and can be downloaded from the project's GitHub repository and used by anyone. 

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