Open Source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework brings enterprise-grade service, governance, security, and performance to private-, public-, and hybrid clouds

Forest Hill, MD –3 June 2014– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache Stratos has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.
"Apache Stratos graduation is an indicator of the project adhering to Apache Way of Open Communities and endorses meritocratic participation," said Suresh Marru, ASF Member and Apache Stratos Incubation Mentor.
Apache Stratos is a highly-extensible Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework that helps run Apache Tomcat, PHP, and MySQL applications and can be extended to support many more environments on all major cloud infrastructures. For developers, Stratos provides a cloud-based environment for developing, testing, and running scalable applications. IT providers benefit from high utilization rates, automated resource management, and platform-wide insight including monitoring and billing.
Originally developed by WSO2, Stratos entered the Apache Incubator in June 2013, and currently has code contributions from dozens of individuals representing Cisco, Citrix, Indiana University, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory among other organizations. 
"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.
Stratos brings self-service management, elastic scaling, multi-tenant deployment, usage monitoring, as well as additional capabilities, such as the ability to take any server software to run "as-a-Service" alongside other app containers. Apache Stratos deploys onto Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) such as Amazon EC2, OpenStack, SUSECloud, VMWare vCloud and many more.

In addition, the Project has announced the release of Apache Stratos v4.0. Improvements include the ability to:

  1. Map into underlying datacenter infrastructure and create policies (called "partitions"): this unique functionality goes beyond other PaaS infrastructures to make Stratos truly enterprise class;
  2. Plug in third-party load balancers such as HAProxy that provides pure TCP load balancing; and
  3. Support real-time complex event processing for autoscaling: Stratos can take any available data on load and usage including on-VM CPU load, network and memory usage, together with data from the load-balancer and pipe this into a powerful real-time event processing engine.
Apache Stratos is used by leading organizations building connected ecosystems in aerospace, telecommunication, and construction industries. Stratos powers one of the world’s largest aviation companies' digital airline initiative to re-invent supply chain logistics.  Leading network infrastructure providers are integrating Apache Stratos to deliver advanced telecommunication services to their client base while maintaining telco-grade reliability and availability under peak load.  A construction and engineering equipment provider is using Apache Stratos to build a multi-tenant cloud solution that can tailor policies and rules to specific niche markets. 

"The successful incubation of Stratos and graduation to an Apache top-level project is a significant step for this project," said Scott Yow, Vice President of product management at Cisco. "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."
"Apache Stratos has a much broader focus than most other PaaS environments, giving me much more flexibility when architecting cloud solutions," said Chris Snow, Solution Architect in the UK Mobile Banking sector. "Stratos 4 is a major evolution of the architecture and is a huge credit to the dedicated and passionate community that are driving this project."
"We are considering Apache Stratos to build Science Gateway Platform Services (http://scigap.org/) for the computational science community," explained Marru, who is also a Principal Systems Architect at Indiana University.
"We've shown that not only do we get the 'Apache Way' as a community, but that it has had a real impact on improving the code. I'm really excited that we have become a fully fledged Apache project and the release of Stratos 4.0 brings a whole range of new capabilities. This is an exciting time for Stratos," added Warusawithana.
Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Stratos software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For documentation and ways to become involved with Apache Stratos, visit http://stratos.apache.org/
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than one hundred and seventy leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Stratos", "Apache Stratos", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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