Apache Stratos Incubator project in Google Summer of Code 2014

The Apache Software Foundation is participating in this year's (2014) Google Summer of Code program and we, at the Apache Stratos Incubator project is lucky enough to get two outstanding project proposals, accepted.

Following are the accepted projects:

1. Improvements to Auto-scaling in Apache Stratos - Asiri Liyana Arachchi 
Auto-scaling enables users to automatically launch or terminate instances based on user-defined policies, health status checks, and schedules. This GSoC project is on improving auto-scaling.


2. Google Compute Engine support for Stratos - Suriya priya Veluchamy 
Stratos uses jclouds to integrate with various IaaS providers. This project is to provide support for GCE(Google Compute Engine) which is google’s IaaS solution, and to run large scale tests in it. 


I'd like to warmly welcome Suriya and Asiri to the Apache Stratos community and looking forward to work with them throughout this period.

Also Congratulations to both of you!!

Happy Coding!

Apache Stratos as a single distribution

In Apache Stratos, we have recently worked on merging 3 of our main products (Stratos Manager, Cloud Controller and Auto-scaler) along with WSO2 CEP (Stratos uses WSO2 CEP as its complex event processing engine) into a single distribution using the powerfulness of WSO2 Carbon Framework. By doing so, we have expected to gain following main benefits:

1. Reduce the barrier for a new developer to getting started with Stratos.

2. Make lives of Stratos developers' easier by reducing the number of JVMs.

3. Deploying a distributed set-up using a single distribution in a production environment.

Earlier, in order to run Stratos, one needed to configure 3 Stratos products mentioned above, in addition to a message broker (Stratos uses message broker as its main inter-component communication channel), WSO2 CEP and WSO2 BAM (if you need monitoring capability). This would be resulted in six JVMs (assuming MB is also a JVM process) and would consume considerable amount of memory of your machine. Hence, lot of new blood, would rather give-up even without thinking of starting Stratos. 

With the introduction of this single distribution, as a developer, you can get-started with Stratos only with two JVMs namely Stratos JVM and MB (assuming it's a JVM), and in-turn would help us to attract more people to the project.

Reducing number of JVMs makes it easier to check logs, debug and makes your life way easier, as a contributor to Stratos. 

Further, you can use this single Stratos distribution and start Stratos Manager, Cloud Controller and Auto-scaler in 3 separate JVMs which will be useful in a real production deployment. In this case, of course you need to deploy WSO2 CEP and WSO2 BAM separately in addition to a Message Broker. 

Other than these, a single JVM Stratos deployment also capable of writing the data published by Stratos into a file (repository/logs/aggregate.log), so that you do not need an external business activity monitor in order to have a developer environment.

Try it out by following our wiki documentation here.

Building your own PaaS using Apache Stratos (Incubator) PaaS Framework - 2

This is a continuation of this post, where I have explained the basic steps you need to follow in order to build your own PaaS using Apache Stratos PaaS Framework. There, I have explained the very first step that you would need to perform on the PaaS Framework using our REST API. Here in this post, I am going to explain how you can perform the same step via Apache Stratos UI.

1. You need to access the Stratos Manager console via the URL that can be found once the set-up has done. eg: https://{SM-IP}:{SM-PORT}/console

Here you need to login as super-admin (user name: admin, password: admin) to the Stratos Manager.

2. Once you have logged in as super-admin, you will be redirected to the My Cartridges page of Stratos UI. This page shows the Cartridge subscriptions you have made. Since we have not done any subscriptions yet, we would see a page like below.

3. Navigate to the 'Configure Stratos' tab.

This page is the main entry point to configure the Apache Stratos PaaS Framework. We have implemented a Configuration Wizard which will walk you through a set of well-defined steps and ultimately help you to configure Stratos.

4. Click on the 'Take the configuration wizard' button and let it begin the wizard.

The first step of the wizard is the Partition Deployment and it is the intention of this blog post, if you can recall. We have provided a sample json file too, in the right hand corner, in order to let you started quickly.

5. You can copy the sample Partition json file, I have used in the post 1, and paste it in the 'Partition Configuration' text box. The text box has an inbuilt validation for json format, so that you cannot proceed by providing an invalid json.

6. Once you have correctly pasted your Partition json, you can click 'Next' to proceed to the next step of the configuration wizard.

Once you have clicked on 'Next', Stratos will validate your Partition configuration and then deploy it, if it is valid. Also you will see a message on top in yellow back-ground if it is successful and in case, your Partition is not valid, you will get to see the error message in a red back-ground.

That's it for now, if you like to explore more please check out our documentation. See you in the next post.

Adding support for a new IaaS provider in Apache Stratos

I have recently added a new wiki page to Apache Stratos documentation on providing a support for a new IaaS provider. You can check that here.

Prerequisite for this would be to have a good knowledge on the IaaS you are going to provide support for and also have some basic understanding of corresponding Apache Jclouds APIs.