WSO2 extending SOA into cloud computing

Available as of November 16, the platform features the company's Cloud Virtual Machines; Cloud Connectors, for secure cloud services; and multi-tenant WSO2 Governance-as-a-Service.

[ Last week, a Unisys executive let slip that cloud computing can save money by eliminating U.S. jobs. ]

WSO2 Cloud Platform enables IT professionals to manage enterprise SOA in a cloud environment, said Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO of WSO2, in a statement released by the company.

"SOA, through its loose coupling of applications, naturally complements cloud computing, with its loose coupling of hardware to software, to provide enterprises significant opportunities for increasing their agility, productivity, and efficiency," Weerawarana said.

WSO2 SOA products are available as WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machines running on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and also as VMware ESX virtual machines. This simplifies deployment for developers and enables scaling as a load increases.

WSO2 products available as Cloud Virtual Machines include Web Services Application Server, Enterprise Service Bus, Governance Registry, Data Services Server, Identity Server, Business Process Server, and Mashup Server. These products also can be downloaded as open source software at no cost, the company said.

The WSO2 Cloud Connector products enable developers to offer fast and secure cloud services, WSO2 said. These include Cloud Services Gateway, offering a secure tunnel into an enterprise from a cloud, and Service Accelerator, decoupling quality of service processing from back-end services and enabling message-processing. The products are composed of a cloud virtual machine and a component running locally within an enterprise, enabling communication between enterprise and cloud systems.

WSO2 Service Accelerator is powered by the WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++, providing a speed advantage of over Java, WSO2 said.

With WSO2 Governance-as-a-Service, the  hosted version of the company's Governance Registry product, users can configure the registry with no software setup. Each tenant can have a theme and manage a user community. Tenants can publish publicly if needed.

The Governance -as-a-Service product is the first product in a family of service-based solutions planned by WSO2 in coming months.

Users can subscribe to Cloud Virtual Machine versions of WSO2 products, including Cloud Service Gateway and Service Accelerator. Products are available at an introductory price of one cent per CPU hour. When made available for production, hourly fees through Amazon will range from $1 for small machines to $2 for large machines. A public WSO2 Cloud Service Gateway is offered at no cost to developers.

WSO2 Governance-as-a-Service is available from WSO2 and includes product support. Limited use is offered at no charge while volume usage starts at $100 per user per year.

This story, "WSO2 extending SOA into cloud computing," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.