Wednesday, 8 February 2012

Carbon's 3rd Birthday

Three years ago I blogged about WSO2 Carbon for the first time. I enthused about a composable server architecture and why it was important for a SOA platform.

At that point there were just 4 Carbon products. Today there are 13 products, the core framework, Stratos, and Carbon Studio all based around the Carbon Architecture.

There are two really important things I think have worked really well:

  • The composability is obviously important and we now have a set of customers doing exactly that - using p2 to combine the correct components and effectively "build your own server" with the right function for their specific needs and requirements.

    But even more interesting for those customers has been the consistency and completeness of the platform that has arisen out of Carbon. The fact that there is a "menu" or palette of low-level components (features) and high level components (products) that all interoperate, behave the same, use the same identity, clustering, registry, key management, etc has really offered customers the opportunity to build out compelling architectures.
  • The kernelization is almost just a corollary of componentization: as you build the components and identify which ones to re-use, we found a common core across those 13 products. The result is that when we came to address cloud - starting later in 2009 - we very quickly realized that there were just a few core places in which to address multi-tenancy, elasticity and metering. I have to admit this was something I for one hadn't thought of, but has been probably the most powerful driver behind the success of StratosLive and Stratos. 
There were certainly people then who doubted that OSGi was a stable basis for an ESB or Server and I hope that the 1bn+ transactions a day that eBay are doing through WSO2 ESB are enough to disprove that.

All in all, it is amazing to see how far Carbon has come and what it has enabled in 3 years.


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