WSO2 Oxygen Tank

Clustering for high availability and scalability is one of the main requirements of any enterprise deployment. This is also true for WSO2's open source SOA middleware products. Managing a cluster can also be cumbersome and tricky.

WSO2 Carbon is the name of the base framework and the architecture of the newer generation of WSO2's Open Source SOA middleware products. It has extensive support for clustering, which it inherits the clustering capabilities which it inherits from Apache Axis2.

WSO2 Carbon provides both cluster management and state replication. The cluster management component provides an easy to use interface for managing a cluster.You could connect to the different member backends of different groups from the cluster management UI and individually manage those members.

The WSO2 ESB can also act as a membership-aware dynamic load balancer. This load balancer itself can be deployed in its own group, which addresses the concern of single point of failure for the load balancer. The figure below shows a possible deployment architecture with cluster management. We also have several new resources available to explain other features and benefits of Carbon, including an architectural overview slide presentation and a downloadable ebook, on the Carbon project page.

WSO2 products perform core functions required within SOAs: service creation, connection, composition and governance. Today, these functionalities, while comprehensive, are limited to certain individual products. For example, you could use WSAS to provide and consume services, and the ESB for message mediation. However, if you want to do both service hosting and message mediation, you have to seprately download and install these individual products.

Offering a full-featured suite of SOA products is great for our customers, but we want to maximize the benefits of SOA by providing even more flexibility. WSO2 has launched a project, code named Carbon, to unify the SOA solutions platform.

Hi WSO2-ers. You might not recognize me, but I've been with WSO2 since May, working behind the scenes on marketing and community development. For the first 3 years that WSO2 has been around, engineers have been focused almost entirely on building great products for Apache and WSO2. Now that we have that solid foundation, it's time to offer our products to the world to help people build really cool SOA applications.

One of the things we've been working on is a simple, clear way to describe all our product offerings. To better tell this story, we launched our new company website last month. Simply put, we provide a lightweight framework, with everything you need to create, connect, compose and govern services for SOA's. I'd like to ask you, our community, to check out the site and let us know what you think. Since you already know and use our products, we think that you'll be the better judge as to whether the new site explains what we offer.

One of the biggest issues companies have had with SOA is what I call bootstrapping: until there are a reasonable number of services in the network, then the value of the SOA is minimal. When I think back to the first time I had an email address, back in 1988, it was effectively useless to me because none of my friends had email. While there was no other option for me back then, other than waiting for my friends to get their own email, you don't have to sit back and wait for SOAs to be usable. We can speed up the time it takes to create useful services - making it simpler to become part of the network.