Building WSO2 Stratos

1. Checkout WSO2 Carbon and WSO2 Stratos

   $ svn checkout http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/carbon
   $ svn checkout http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/stratos
   

2. In order to build WSO2 Carbon, first need to build two Axis2 plugins. As the Axis2 README points out, this is due to some dependency resolution issues in Maven
   • Build Axis2 AAR Maven plugin

     $ cd carbon/dependencies/axis2/modules/tool/axis2-aar-maven-plugin/
     $ mvn clean install
     

   • Bulid Axis2 MAR Maven plugin

     $ cd carbon/dependencies/axis2/modules/tool/axis2-mar-maven-plugin/
     $ mvn clean install
     

3. Build Carbon dependencies

   $ cd carbon/dependencies
   $ mvn clean install
   

4. Build Carbon Orbit

   $ cd carbon/orbit
   $ mvn clean install
   

5. Bulid Carbon core

   $ cd carbon/core
   $ mvn clean install
   

6. Bulid Carbon components

   $ cd carbon/components
   $ mvn clean install
   

7. Build Carbon features

   $ cd carbon/features
   $ mvn clean install
   

8. Build WSO2 Stratos
   • Bulid WSO2 Stratos components

     $ cd stratos/components
     $ mvn clean install
     

   • Build WSO2 Stratos features

     $ cd stratos/components
     $ mvn clean install
     

   • Build WSO2 Stratos services

     $ cd stratos/services
     $ mvn clean install
     

     This will create binary distributions for each service in, stratos/services//modules/distribution/target

Configuring WSO2 Stratos

Cloud manager is a special program designed to manage all other services. Therefore some configuration parameters differ from other services. There are some configuration parameters which are common across all the services.

Once you build WSO2 Stratos, unzip binary packages to a folder. <statos dir> in the following configurations refer to the folder you get when you unzip a binary distribution.

Common configurations

These are common to cloud manager as well as other services. Configuration files are located at <stratos dir>/repository/conf

1. carbon.xml

   You should change ServerURL, HostName, and Name parameter. E.g.,

   <ServerURL>https://example.com${carbon.context}/services/</ServerURL>
   <HostName>example.com</HostName>
   <Name>WSO2 Stratos Cloud Application Server</Name> (this name should
   be same as the name given in cloud-services-desc.xml cloud manager)
   

2. axis2.xml

   Configure mail transport. E.g.,

   <transportSender name="mailto" class="org.apache.axis2.transport.mail.MailTransportSender">
           <parameter name="mail.smtp.host">smtp.example.org</parameter>
           <parameter name="mail.smtp.port">25</parameter>
           <parameter name="mail.smtp.starttls.enable">false</parameter>
           <parameter name="mail.smtp.auth">true</parameter>
           <parameter name="mail.smtp.user">user</parameter>
           <parameter name="mail.smtp.password">password</parameter>
           <parameter name="mail.smtp.from">noreply@example.com</parameter>
   </transportSender>
   

3. mgt-transport.xml

   Configure proxy ports. E.g.,

   <transport name="http" class="org.wso2.carbon.server.transports.http.HttpTransport">
           <parameter name="port">9763</parameter>1
           <parameter name="proxyPort">80</parameter>
           ...
   
   <transport name="https" class="org.wso2.carbon.server.transports.http.HttpsTransport">
           <parameter name="port">9443</parameter>
           <parameter name="proxyPort">443</parameter>
   

4. registry.xml

   Database configuration. E.g.,

   </dbConfig>
           <dbConfig name="WSO2Registry">
           <url>jdbc:mysql://db.example.com:3306/registry_db?autoReconnect=true</url>
           <userName>user</userName>
           <password>password</password>
           <driverName>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driverName>
           <maxActive>50</maxActive>
           <maxWait>60000</maxWait>
           <minIdle>5</minIdle>
           <validationQuery>SELECT 1</validationQuery>
   </dbConfig>
   

5. user-mgt.xml

   Configure user store. E.g.,

   <Property name="url">jdbc:mysql://db.example.com:3306/userstore_db?autoReconnect=true</Property>
   <Property name="userName">user</Property>
   <Property name="password">password</Property>
   <Property name="driverName">com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</Property>
   <Property name="maxActive">50</Property>
   <Property name="maxWait">60000</Property>
   <Property name="minIdle">5</Property>
   <Property name="MultiTenantRealmConfigBuilder">org.wso2.carbon.user.core.config.multitenancy.SimpleRealmConfigBuilder</Property>
   <Property name="validationQuery">SELECT 1</Property>
   

6. Copy MySQL JDBC driver to <stratos dir>/repository/components/lib. MySQL JDBC driver can be downloaded from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/
7. wrapper.conf

   wrapper.java.additional.11=-Dcarbon.https.port=443
   wrapper.java.additional.12=-Dcarbon.http.port=80
   

8. axis2_client.xml

   Increase SO_TIMEOUT of http and https about 60 seconds <parameter name="SO_TIMEOUT">60000</parameter>

Cloud Manager Configuration

1. billing-config.xml

   Database configuration. E.g.,

   <dbConfig>
           <url>jdbc:mysql://db.example.com:3306/billing_db?autoReconnect=true</url>
           <userName>user</userName>
           <password>password</password>
           <driverName>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driverName>
           <maxActive>80</maxActive>
           <maxWait>60000</maxWait>
           <minIdle>5</minIdle>
           <validationQuery>SELECT 1</validationQuery>
   </dbConfig>
   

2. tenant-reg-agent.xml

   <tenantRegListenerServers>
           <server>
               <!-- governance -->
               <serverUrl>https://governance.example.com/services/</serverUrl>
               <userName>admin</userName>
               <password>password</password>
           </server>
           <server>
               <!-- identity -->
               <serverUrl>https://identity.example.com/services/</serverUrl>
               <userName>admin</userName>
               <password>password</password>
           </server>
           <server>
               <!-- gadget -->
               <serverUrl>https://gadget.example.com/services/</serverUrl>
               <userName>admin</userName>
               <password>password</password>
           </server>
           ...
   </tenantRegListenerServers>
   

3. cloud-services-desc.xml

   <cloudService name="WSO2 Stratos Cloud Governance">
           <label>Cloud Governance</label>
           <link>https://governance.example.com</link>
           <description>Governance in the cloud.</description>
           <icon>
   
   https://example.com/cloud-services-icons/governance.gif
   
           </icon>
   </cloudService>
   

4. All the configurations starting with email_ should be modified with correct
   cloud manager URL

Other services

Other services means all the services except could manager.

1. metering-config.xml

   Metering configuration have to be changed to include cloud admin username, password (in post handler and pre handler)

   <handler service="org.wso2.stratos.metering.agent.handlers.RemoteTaskInvoker" async="true" frequency="1">
           <parameter name="taskServiceUrl">https://cloud.wso2.com/services/</parameter>
           <parameter name="userName">user</parameter>
           <parameter name="password">password</parameter>
           <parameter name="taskName">org.wso2.stratos.metering.manager.task.PerRegistryRequestRemoteTask</parameter>
   </handler>
   

2. In Appserver carbon.xml, you can specify the URL for BAM so that you can monitor appserver.

   <BamServerURL>https://bam.example.com/services/BAMServiceStatisticsSubscriberService</BamServerURL>
   

That’s it!

If you take a step back and look at the big picture, I think the audience for a private cloud is vastly different from the audience for a public cloud.

Public cloud is the ideal solution if you’re just a startup trying to setup infrastructure such as source code repositories, bug trackers, wikis, CRMs and so on. Utilizing features of a public cloud like Amazon EC2, you can increase the computing resource when you need it. No need to pay big sums upfront for high end hardware. You can expand or shrink your computing resources as you go along.

Private cloud, on the other hand, is useful if you already have the hardware. You have purchased high end hardware anticipating your resource needs in the future and now they’re under utilized. In this case, having a private cloud infrastructure will help you to make use of your otherwise idle computing resources. Pay as you go feature of public clouds doesn’t apply in this case. Elasticity, yes, if your applications are written using the same APIs.

For example, WSO2 Stratos, can scale in Amazon EC2 as well as in a private cloud such as UEC (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud). UEC runs Eucalyptus for providing a private cloud infrastructure which is API compatible with Amazon EC2/S3/EBS.

So, IMHO, public cloud and private cloud has their own places in this world.

Samisa has written a post giving some background about how Stratos came to life. Infoworld has some more info.

Usually people don’t open up all their source code that goes into a hosted version. But the source code for WSO2 Stratos is open source and available with an Apache license. You can grab a source tarball here or checkout the source code using subversion.

What is libvirt? Libvirt is an effort to come up with an API for all virtualization platforms. Plus, it does have an implementation (libvirtd) which other management programs can talk to. For example virsh and virt-manager are couple of tools which can talk to underlying virtualization platforms such as Xen and KVM through libvirt.

Going a step further than libvirt, OpenNebula eases the creation of networks, adding cluster nodes and deploying virtual machines. Also, OpenNebula comes with a scheduler which will deploy a given virtual machine on the cluster. Scheduling policies can be configured and if more complex policies are needed those can be created through Haizea. Haizea is a scheduler which can be plugged into OpenNebula. OpenNebula stores all these information in an SQLite database that can be accessed from any other programming language if those information needs to be pulled out. A nice to have feature would be an API that gives all kinds of information stored in the SQLite database.

With my experience developing applications with Microsoft technologies, the biggest gripe I have so far is the lack of flexibility. I can recall in one instance where I tried to log raw XML messages going through Geneva libraries turned out to be very difficult. The successful documented scenarios, happy path, in other words work marvelously. Turning on WCF logging didn’t log the RST message coming to Geneva. Solution to that problem turned out to be overriding the XML writer method to write the stream to a file. Ultimately was able to get it solved without having to do that.

Coming back to Azure, it seems that it’s not a low level virtualized environment like Amazon EC2. The lines are still blurry to me when it’s positioned somewhere in between EC2 and Google App Engine. One problem of having a platform layer (Windows Azure OS) that sits above the actual OS is, the way of doing things will be different. One major advantage of EC2 is if you boot up a Windows machine, it’s Windows. Azure, things are different. Comparing, a major advantage is things can be simplified to a jaw droppingly awesome level. With the development frabric installed which lets you test your applications on your local machine before deploying to Windows Azure platform, Windows programs you develop through Visual Studio can be deployed within seconds. You don’t have to learn any additional deployment methods. Great for application developers. If you want to do something at a lower level you need to learn more.

The most interesting part for me atleast is the support for FastCGI. Through that, you can call native code. Like PHP for example. The PHP Azure SDK seems really interesting.

Usually in technically adept circles you can hear virtualization being used more often than the term cloud computing, the technology that enable computers to evaporate into small H₂O particles and form clouds. Virtualization tools have been there for a while. It was, IMHO, got popular after Amazon slapped a Web services interface in front of Xen and said, try using this interface to start/stop and manage virtual machines. Having a separate service for persistent storage, again, is a brilliant marketing move. With big investments (such as Intel investing in Joyent) one can guarantee that the cloud space will get cloudier as time progress. This might make projects such as Simple Cloud more attractive.

Adoption rates for cloud computing is going to increase among the big guys. As a survey done by Forrester tells “one out of four large companies plan to use an external provider soon, or have already employed one”. When people are seriously considering moving to cloud platforms, you have to make sure that all the application programs are ready to be run on a virtualized environment. Specially SOA middleware products that the company is using should be compatible and must be able to take advantage of the services provided.

One advantage of moving to cloud computing is the ability to add/remove resources as and when it’s required. If your applications, or middleware products that you’re using is incapable of getting advantage of this elasticity (autoscaling to the inner techie in you) there’s no point, or no value gained by putting your stuff in the cloud. It’s one reason why WSO2 has “cloud enabled” all of the products line. Not only you can host all your services in the cloud using WSO2 middleware products, you can download pre-built images for VMware and KVM to run inside your private virtualized infrastructure. Give it a whirl and see!