Mountain View, CA, July 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Microservices increasingly are becoming the software architecture of choice as enterprises seek to deliver apps and services with greater agility, resiliency, reliability, performance and efficiency. However, as thousands of microservices replace hundreds of enterprise apps, agile development is hindered by the heavy footprint and waterfall orientation of the legacy technology used to securely integrate them. To address this challenge, WSO2 today announced the Summer 2018 Release of its WSO2 Integration Agile Platform, which supports an integration agile approach to implementing microservices.
WSO2’s Summer 2018 Release features several new product developments and service offerings designed to support microservices architectures. The latest version of the WSO2 Integration Agile Platform brings new capabilities to its integrated API management, enterprise integration, analytics, and identity and access management (IAM) offerings. Additionally, it is backed by new WSO2 Platform Licensing to support enterprise environments that are deploying middleware as a dynamic collection of services or microservices.
By delivering its functionality via a cloud native, open source platform, WSO2 facilitates the agility and innovation required to thrive in rapidly evolving markets driven by disruptive technologies and digital business models—while protecting organizations against lock-in. Now with the Summer 2018 Release, WSO2 brings platform-wide support for the agile development and deployment of highly distributed, lightweight microservices.
“To successfully build modern architectures, we have to free developers from the waterfall orientation of traditional integration and empower development teams to autonomously operate by becoming integration agile,” said WSO2 CEO Tyler Jewell. “Our Summer 2018 Release advances this evolution with open, integrated products and services that enable enterprises to capitalize on microservices to innovate new digital products that operate throughout their organizations and across ecosystems.”
Making Microservices Integration Agile
WSO2 helps digitally driven organizations to become integration agile through the company’s integrated platform, open source approach, and agile transformation methodology. With the Summer 2018 Release, it offers several technology developments designed to securely integrate, implement, deploy and analyze microservices.
Secure, low-latency access to microservices via WSO2 API Microgateway eliminates the need for a central gateway by enabling enterprises to apply API management policies in a decentralized fashion. WSO2 API Microgateway has the flexibility to serve as a dedicated proxy for a microservice, a sidecar for a microservice running on the same host, or an API hub that proxies one or more microservices. Available today with WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 API Microgateway is managed by the API Publisher application. Meanwhile, the microservices it handles are discoverable on the API Store developer portal. The Summer 2018 Release adds local in-memory rate limiting and operational analytics through metrics. It also performs security, including Open Authorization (OAuth), Basic Authentication, and Signed JSON Web Token (JWT).
Real-time microservices analytics are enabled by WSO2 Stream Processor, a lightweight runtime that can run in distributed deployments using Kafka and container-native environments, such as Kubernetes. With the Summer 2018 Release, it adds support for message tracing across microservices using the OpenTracing standard for better insights into performance. Additionally, it provides default support for analyzing HTTP services; improved connectors and monitoring for distributed processing; and built-in analytics dashboards for HTTP, message tracing, and Twitter hashtags. Finally, usability is enhanced with improved snapshot state persistence using an incremental approach and an improved streaming application builder with a drag-and-drop configuration user interface (UI).
Microservices integration is optimized using the MicroESB in WSO2 Enterprise Integrator. Available with the Summer 2018 Release, the MicroESB is a lightweight mediation runtime that includes all core mediation capabilities. As a profile of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator, the MicroESB is based on the same features as the Integration profile and offers a significantly faster startup time, making it ideal for containers. In addition, the newest release of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator supports Eclipse Oxygen, the latest version of the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE).
Microservices are secured using WSO2 Identity Server, which acts as the single source of truth across the enterprise, managing user identities, enforcing global authorization policies, and acting as a trust broker for user identities across enterprise-level trust boundaries. With the Summer 2018 Release, WSO2 Identity Server introduces support for role-based access control (RBAC) and validation using the Java Web Token (JWT) standard that has been widely adopted for microservices. This is accomplished via MicroProfile JWT (MP-JWT) RBAC security specification support and JWT signature validation based on the JSON Web Key Set (JWKS). The new release also extends the use of the Secure Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) for authentication with SAML binding support for SAML Identity Provider (IdP) and support for the European Union electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services (eIDAS) SAML attribute profile.
Platform Licensing for Microservices Environments
Increasingly middleware capabilities are deployed as a dynamic collection of services or microservices, rather than as a set of servers easily counted in advance. At the same time, many customers want to benefit from access to the breadth of WSO2 platform capabilities for advanced integration, API management, identity management, and stream processing. To support these environments, WSO2 has introduced the WSO2 Platform License for WSO2 Subscription, WSO2's commercial offering.
WSO2 Subscription features access to WSO2 Update for continuous delivery of bug fixes, security updates, and performance enhancements, along with WSO2 Support for 24x7 support. Now, with the WSO2 Platform License, customers can purchase a simple single subscription tiered to the number of CPUs allotted for WSO2 deployments. Within this allotment, any of WSO2’s primary products can be deployed as needed to meet the scalability or functional demands of the day, making adoption of WSO2 in container-based environments simpler and more cost-effective.
Other enhancements to WSO2’s services and support include:
- Unified pricing for cloud and on-premises WSO2 Subscription offerings means customers can simply buy a WSO2 Subscription and choose the hosting model—cloud, on-premises or hybrid—based on their preferences. There is no model lock-in since, at any point, customers can choose to change the hosting/consumption model within their unified WSO2 Subscription.
- The new Technical Account Manager (TAM) program provides a named technical support contact. This TAM acts as the first line of support, manages a priority support queue during working hours in a customer’s time zone, and can be embedded onsite. A TAM enables faster response and resolution times, maintains context across issues, and stays alert to address potential problems before they become support issues.
- A new WSO2 Update Service “security-only” channel is available for customers who need to keep current with security features but are not ready in their lifecycle stage to make all updates. The security-only channel introduced in the Summer 2018 Release includes just security updates and selected bug fixes with clear dependencies from a security update.
- Expanded WSO2 product installation experiences simplify the evaluation, deployment and integration with DevOps systems. Today, they include Docker images, native installers for popular operating systems, and an updated version of WSO2 Update Manager. Many options include pre-installed WSO2 Updates that make it easier to deploy bug fixes and security updates into development, test and production environments. Additional installation offerings set to launch in Q3 2018 are Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry Tiles, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Formation.
About WSO2
WSO2 is the world’s #1 open source integration vendor, helping digital-driven organizations become integration agile. Customers choose us for our broad integrated platform, approach to open source, and agile transformation methodology. The company’s hybrid platform for developing, reusing, running and managing integrations prevents lock-in through open source software that runs on-premises or in the cloud. Today, hundreds of leading brands and thousands of global projects execute 5 trillion transactions annually using WSO2 integration technologies. Visit https://wso2.com to learn more.
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