WSO2ConEU 2016: WSO2 and containerized deployments

Tutorial Day: Deploying WSO2 Middleware on Containers

As is custom, WSO2ConEU 2016 started of with Preconference Tutorials. The first tutorial session I attended was all about running WSO2 products in various containers. Lakmal Warusawithana and Imesh Gunaratne went into some detail how to setup and manage Docker images, but also how to host your containers on various platforms like Kubernetes, Mesos and some other platforms.Opportunities aplenty to virtualize your WSO2 environments in a scalable and manageable way. The most import conclusion for me though was that although this certainly has some advantages, they are still not much more than Virtual Machines that run a WSO2 full product, creating containers with a large footprint that take quite some time to start. This was also voiced by the presenters as something that still needed work. However, as always the interesting part was in tail end of the session. During the closing Q&A there was some talk about Carbon 5.

Opening keynote

As containerization is becoming more and more important it seems to be a recurring theme at this year’s conference, playing a significant part in today’s keynote by WSO2’s CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana as well. Carbon 5 will be based on a ‘container native architecture’, which he describes as, rapid starting and not long running. Meaning that you will only spin up a specific container when the need arises, and shut it down when it’s task is done. To be able to do this though, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, it needs to start rapidly, preferably in under a second, it needs a low memory footprint and maybe most importantly it needs to have a single function or a small set of related functions. If it would have more that one (set of) functions you would be enlarging the footprint, and taking up more resources than required every time you spin up a container.

The future looks bright with the new Carbon 5 at the core of the new WSO2 products. Currently the kernel is GA and more is to come. I for one like the direction this is taking and cannot wait to get to work with Carbon 5 and the products based on it.

Carbon 5 will be geared towards deploying smaller units in containers like Docker, without having to deploy a full product in every container. In other words, WSO2 believes containerized deployment to be the future, and Carbon 5 will be the first proper step in that direction.

P.S. Here you can read about the opening keynote of CTO and Founder of WSO2 Sanjiva Weerawarana too. Also Isabelle Mauny, the Vice President of Product Strategy at WSO2 had a great keynote, about Customer Experience with WSO2 Anallytics.