StratosLive Frequently Asked Questions
StratosLive Start-up Questions
StratosLive Start-up Questions
I have registered an account just now. Why am I unable to log in yet?
Please make sure that you have validated the registration, by clicking the validation link in the email sent to you. Also make sure that you have entered the username (in the form of adminname@domainname) and password correct.
Why should I validate my domain?
While domain validation is optional, you can prove the ownership of the domain by validating the domain. Otherwise, you may have to lose your account, if the legitimate owner of the domain claims it. You might skip this step at the time of registration, and validate the domain at a later time from your account.
I have registered for a particular Stratos Service. Now do I have to register for the other services?
No, you don't have to. Stratos tenants are centrally managed. That means, if you have registered from a service, you will be able to use all the Stratos services. However, as the tenant admin, you will be able to activate and deactivate the Stratos services, from Stratos Manager.
I didn't get any email after registering or after resetting my password?
Please check your spam folder, in case if the mail had been treated as a spam by your mail server. If it is still not there, you may need to contact WSO2 Support on sorting this out. We are glad to help from our end.
How do I get any further assistance on using Stratos/StratosLive?
Please contact WSO2 using http://wso2.com/contact/, if you need further assistance. StratosLive forum can be found at http://wso2.org/forum/1241. You also can send your queries to the stratos-dev mailing list (stratos-dev@wso2.org) regarding StratosLive PaaS or Stratos Cloud Middleware Platform.
I have registered for a 'Demo/Free' account. Will I be charged, if I exceed the usage limits?
Free/Demo accounts are never charged. Anyway, you can upgrade and downgrade your usage plan at any time.
Now I have registered for an account. What's next?
If you are familiar with the WSO2 Carbon based products, there is nothing new to learn for StratosLive. StratosLive is simply the WSO2 Carbon Middleware Platform as a Service, with all the WSO2 Carbon based products available publicly over the cloud as services. For a detailed introduction to the Platform aspect of Carbon and StratosLive, refer to the article, “WSO2 StratosLive - An Enterprise Ready Java PaaS.”
Using StratosLive - General Questions
Does Stratos support multi-tenant model?
Yes, Stratos supports a multi-tenant model. In StratosLive PaaS, WSO2 is the super admin, and you have register a tenant. You can OEM Stratos, by setting up a private cloud for your own. In that case, you would be the super tenant and you can decide what level of functionality you want to allow your tenants.
How does Stratos overcome the inherent security challenges of the cloud?
Tenants are isolated from each other in Stratos. Data processing code is protected by java security manager, hence the custom code deployed by tenants (such as web applications and web services) does not have access to it. Tenants are also prevented from executing the priviledged actions, such as opening the ports and accessing the file system. For more insights, please refer to the article, “How WSO2 StratosLive meets Security Challenges in Cloud.”
How is multi-tenancy achieved in Stratos? Is it at the Database level or the application level?
It is multi-tenanted at the database level, as far as the data stored by Stratos is concerned. For user data, we are currently working on a polyglot data architecture which will allow a range of choices from a share, multi-tenant NoSQL feature (based on Cassandra) to a per-tenant database model.
Do we have the opportunity to customize or extend Stratos as appropriate?
StratosLive is a publicly hosted Stratos Cloud Middleware Platform-as-a-Service, where you are using the services as a tenant. Tenants have limited access due to the security and the other concerns. But if you host Stratos in your own data center and OEM Stratos, as super tenant you will be able to extend Stratos and customize it more, as you prefer.
What are the developer frameworks supported by Stratos/StratosLive?
StratosLive is a Java Platform as a Service. We currently support any Java developer framework as we are currently only supporting deploying Java webapps (WAR files).
Does Stratos support secure tunneling?
Yes, Stratos supports secure tunneling via the Cloud Services Gateway. Cloud Services Gateway is used to create a managed, secured channel for business processes and other tasks running in a public cloud to get access to enterprise data and services. It allows the service and data owners inside the enterprise to selectively publish services and data to the cloud. The resulting services can be fully protected – authentication, authorization, confidentiality, integrity and more. Here only the approved messages are delivered to access the services.
Does Stratos support elasticity?
Yes, we do support elasticity with the cloud provider. In StratosLive, the services are fronted by WSO2 Load Balancer, which balances the load across the service instances and scales the services automatically according to the load. Stratos services also can scale with the other load balancers including the hardware loadbalancers.
Does Stratos support single sign-on?
Yes, single sign-on and single sign-out are supported by design. Once you have logged into any of the Stratos services, you will not need to sign in to the other services.
Does Stratos support integration with customer's on-premise Identity Management?
Yes. It is possible, and we will need to work with the customer to do this.
What lag times can we expect in different parts of the globe?
This depends on the clients' deployment infrastructure, and where they decide to host it. We are currently working on support for Amazon's availability zones, so that we can isolate tenants to specific data centers.
Is there any speed issues reported with any specific data types or streams?
No issues yet. Our architecture is 100% streaming, so we do not expect any issues either. EBay uses WSO2 Eneterprise Service Bus for 600 million messages/day and has flat line memory for messages ranging from 1kB to 100MB.
What are the supported cloud-providers?
StratosLive is deployed on our co-lo servers over the native hardware. We also have had the public cloud deployed on top of Amazon’s EC2. We also have a private cloud setup that is deployed on Eucalyptus. Stratos follows the open standards, and is not coded for any particular cloud provider. Hence it is expected to work on any Infrastructure as a Service.
Does Stratos support encrypted communications?
Yes, it does. Data communication from the browser to back-end Admin Services happens over https (encrypted), which provides transport-level protection.
Does StratosLive support metering?
Yes, it does. Tenants are metered and billed for their usage. Tenants can view their usage information from Stratos Manager. For more insights on the metering, throttling, and billing, refer to the article “Metering, Throttling and Billing in StratosLive”.
Do you support Memcache?
Yes, we have a scalable distributed cache using EHCache that we expose via the Java caching API.
Can we set up our Stratos locally or as a PaaS?
Sure. StratosLive is a publicly hosted PaaS by WSO2. Similarly, you can deploy Stratos publicly over the cloud for your organization or for the public. In this case, you will be the super tenant. You can also deploy Stratos as a private cloud for your organization. Hybrid cloud set ups too are possible.
Is it possible to migrate our services and data from our tenant in StratosLive to our private Stratos cloud setup?
Migrating from StratosLive to your private Stratos cloud setup is possible, since StratosLive is the same Stratos Cloud Middleware platform hosted as StratosLive Platform as a Service.
Can we isolate specific accounts for throttling or increase bandwidth?
Yes, the load balancing logic and throttling logic are tenant aware. So if you are deploying Stratos locally, as the super tenant, you will be able to throttle the tenants.
Can we setup Stratos in a personal computer?
You can setup Stratos in a computer with all the services, given that the computer has the required memory, processor, and disk space. For example, Stratos requires 4 GB memory, and at least 8 GB is recommended. You may also find it convenient to run only the services that you require at once, if you have limited resources.