WSO2 Stratos Application Server - Apache Tomcat As a Service

Few days back, one of my friends developed a new web application and he wanted to try it out by deploying on a J2EE server. I was at his place and was observing the steps he followed to deploy the web app.

• Downloaded the latest version of Apache Tomcat Server
• Extracted and installed it on a local server
• Ran the startup script and started the server

This took considerable amount of time. In the world of everything offered as services, my friend was not aware of the free service of hosting web applications in cloud. In other words, my friend has not known of "Apache Tomcat As a Service".

If I was him, I would have tried out my web applications with Apache Tomcat by following the three simple steps given below.



Step 1 - Create a demo user account at WSO2 StratosLive



This is a simple registration procedure and follow the steps given in my previous blog post to create a demo account.



Step 2 - Access WSO2 Stratos Application Server

You can access Application Server from WSO2 Stratos Manager home page or just type https://appserver.stratoslive.wso2.com in your favorite browser.









Step 3 - Upload web application



Click on Manage --> Web Applications --> Add in the left navigation menu. You will be directed to the following screen.







Browse the webapp (*.war) in your local machine and click on upload. I downloaded a sample calendar.war webapp from here for demonstration purposes. Once the file upload is done, the deployed calendar.war will be listed in Running Web Applications page where you can do all web app management tasks such as session handling, reloading webapps, deleting etc..



Isn't this the simplest way to run your web applications? You will not be charged a cent for the steps which I demonstrated above. Once you are satisfied with testing your web apps on Stratos Application Server, you can upgrade your usage plan as needed and have an enterprise ready web application running on cloud!

WSO2 Data As a Service - Have your own data storage in cloud!

WSO2 StratosLive, the most complete open PaaS (platform-as-a-service), includes multiple types of SOA middleware services which can be used to build and host your SOA based solution. One of the newest additions to WSO2 middleware platform is, the functionality which enables you to have your own database in cloud for free!

This post guides you through the steps of creating your own data storage in cloud using WSO2 StratosLive.

Step 1

First, we need to create an account in stratoslive. You can have a demo account free of charge.

Open a browser and access WSO2 StratosLive landing page. Click on Get Started Now for Free

You will be directed to domain registration page.

Fill the form and follow the instructions in registration email to activate the account.

Once you logged into WSO2 StratosLive, you will be shown all of the cloud services which are available for use. Out of those services, click on Data Services Server link.







You will be directed to the home page of WSO2 Data Service Server.



Step 2

Now, we have accessed the home page WSO2 Data service server in cloud. You will notice Databases menu item in the left navigation pane as shown below.







Click on Databases --> Add option in the above screen. You will be directed to the New Database page. In this page, you will be asked to provide Database Server Instance Name and a name for the database which you are going to add. By default, WSO2 Data Services Server provides you with a pre-configured Amazon RDS instance, in which you can create your database. You also add your own database server instance and use that instead as you preferred. But in this example, we will use the default database server instance. Lets select the default DB server instance and enter "qa" as the name of the database.

Once you click on create, you will be prompted a confirmation dialog, "Database has been successfully created".



Your newly created database will be listed in database list as shown below. Note that, the name of the database is suffixed with tenant domain name.







Step 3



We have created our first database successfully in cloud using WSO2 Data Service Server. Lets, add a new user to the database and create table so that we can use the database for any DB related operation.



Click on Manage icon in the above table. Database User Management page will be shown.







Before adding any user, you should add a database user privilege group. Click on Add Privilege Group and add a new privilege group. Specify select, insert, update, delete and create privileges for the group as shown below.







The newly created privilege group will be shown in Database User Privilege Groups page as follows.







Now, go back to the previous page and click on add new database users icon to access Database Users screen where you can add DB users. Click on add new user.

Specify "test" as username and password and select "group1" as the privilege group.







Step 4



Once you create a new DB user, it will be listed in Database Users page with the options to explore database using the given user credentials, edit, drop and create carbon datasource.

Click on explore database. Database console screen will be displayed as follows. This console allows you to issue any SQL statement and act as an SQL editor for your database.

You may type any SQL statement and hit run button so that the query will be executed on the database which has been created in the default amazon RDS instance provided by WSO2.







Now, you can use this DB as your storage media in your SOA platform in cloud. For example, you may deploy a webapp in WSO2 Stratos AppServer which talks to this particular DB. Or you may simply create a data service using this database.

PaaS testing

PaaS (Platform as a Service) is an application delivery model which provides services to design, develop, test, deploy and host applications. It plays a key role in cloud computing space similar to the other services, IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and SaaS (software as a service). Google App engine, vmForce and WSO2 Stratos are some of the popular PaaS offerings.
This post is not about detailed concepts of PaaS or cloud computing. Rather, I'm going to look at the testing and quality assurance aspects of PaaS. PaaS testing is not a widely discussed topic. There is no pre-defined model for PaaS testing. We need to explore the features of PaaS and derive an approach for testing PaaS apps. I will go through some basic components based on my experience of testing WSO2 Stratos opensource cloud platform.

Hosted services testing - Minimized deployment overhead

In simplest terms, PaaS testing is about testing a hosted platform. So, there is no deployment and configuration overhead for the test team. Testers are expected to access the hosted services remotely using web browser and carry out functional and non-functional testing.

Lesser test platform combinations

When you test a standalone product or a combination of products, you should try out the possible platform combinations such as different types of clustering setups, multiple DBMSs, Application Servers or various operating systems. However, when you test the same product suite or platform on cloud (PaaS), you are bound to one optimum configuration stack. You have one or two choices. There is no requirement to try all possible platform setups.

Multi-tenancy aspects

Multi-tenancy allows a single application to emulate multiple application instances. With multi-tenancy, a single application can be shared across many organizations. Therefore, series of tests should be carried out carefully to verify the multi-tenant aspects. For example, if company A logs in to a web application hosting service in your PaaS offering and deploy a web app, then the users of company B should not be able to locate it unless company A made it public. In other words, the configurations done by one tenant should not be exposed to other tenants.
These mission-critical aspects are some of the key requirements which should be taken into account in any PaaS testing model.

Performance and scalability

Any hosted service should conform with the SLAs. Similar to a website, services included in a PaaS can be accessed by multiple users concurrently. Therefore, sufficient amount of performance testing must be carried out. The usual usage pattern of standalone technology platform can be dramaticallty changed when it is hosted as a service in cloud. For example, the general use cases of WSO2 Carbon SOA middleware platform are different from the standalone version when the platform is exposed as a service. WSO2 SOA middleware platform consists of 12 different products and all of them includes a management UI for administration purposes. In non-cloud based deployment, the multiple, concurrent users access to the management UIs are minimum since it is very rare that hundred of administrators accessing management console at once.
However, if this platform is hosted as a service in cloud (PaaS), then the concurrent user access to the management UIs are a highly desirable scenario.

It is a requirement that the hosted platform should be able to handle load seamlessly without affecting consumers. Auto-scaling is a key feature of WSO2 Stratos cloud platform. When new resources are needed, WSO2 Stratos transparently adds services and when load goes down, WSO2 Stratos automatically brings services down. Testers should ensure, with the load, the new EC2 instances spawning up and down correctly. The tools like hybridfox are very useful in these situations.

Data

If your PaaS provides users with the ability to store their data in cloud and various database centric operations, then the testing will be much complicated. As a tester, you must ensure the availability of data sources, accessibility and provisioning aspects. You must also take extra care that, if the data are geographically distributed in cloud, then it adheres to the legal requirements of the users of your PaaS.

Security

Security is the utmost important aspect of any cloud offering. It is recommended to have a separate group of security testers who do penetration testing and ethical hacking in order to ensure secure infrastructure of your PaaS. WSO2 Stratos cloud platform allows users to deploy their webapps, web services and various custom code. Therefore we must ensure that no vulnerable code are deployed and a code deployed by one tenant does not affect the operations of others or whole platform.

Virtualization

Public PaaS offerings are usually based on virtualized infrastructure such as Amazon EC2. Therefore, a full functional test cycle should be carried out on EC2 VMs inorder to make sure that there are no regressions due to virtual servers.

In addition to the above key areas, PaaS testing model should consists of the general web application testing aspects such as cross browser testing, accessibility testing, localization testing etc..