Apache Elevates Stratos PaaS to Top-Level Project

The Apache Software Foundation is putting a push on open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) by bringing its Stratos PaaS offering out of the Apache Incubator and promoting it to top-level project. Although it may not seem like a huge deal, consider that although infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in the open source world has its fair share of proponents and vendors, PaaS is lagging far behind.

Graduating Stratos to a top-level project and making it a stronger priority for the open source organization will put further emphasis on Stratos, but it also indicates a stronger interest in open source PaaS within the organization. Whether end-customer organizations and developers are likewise interested remains to be seen, but it’s likely there will be some indication of Stratos’ success or failure in the next few months.

Stratos is a PaaS framework that helps run Apache Tomcat, PHP and MySQL applications. It was designed so it could support more environments on “all major cloud infrastructures.” Specific to developers, Stratos was designed to provide a cloud-based environment for developing, testing and running scalable applications.

Stratos was originally developed by WSO2 and entered the Apache Incubator in June 2013. After a year, Stratos has hopefully gone through plenty of testing and development.

“Donating Stratos to the Apache Incubator has been a great success. We have added significant new capabilities to the technology and at the same time the community has really grown,” said Lakmal Warusawithana, vice president of Apache Stratos and director of Cloud Architecture at WSO2, in a prepared statement.

At the same time, Stratos has undergone several enhancements, including:

“The addition of the partitioning and complex autoscaling capabilities in Stratos 4.0 are critical to service provider-grade deployments. The  disaster recovery and high-availability support provide the foundation for a 99.999-plus percent platform and is a significant improvement to Stratos, which we applaud,” said Scott Yow, vice president of Product Management at Cisco Systems, in a prepared statement.