It was three years ago that I blogged “Yes we did it!!!”
Yes we did it, three years ago. So WSO2 Carbon Middleware Platform is now three years old.
You can find what Paul & Sanjiva had to say about Carbon three yours ago, as I captured those links in that post.
I could also fin a blog by Isuru on this Carbon releases. That post shows the four main products we released with this Carbon 1.5 release. And yes, it was not Carbon 1.0 that we released three years ago, rather Carbon 1.5.
Even though the public got to know Carbon three years ago, WSO2 started discussing Carbon internally four years ago. It was discussed in the WSO2’s annual off-site planning meeting in 2008, under the title “product unification”. At that time, I was working with the C team, and the unification was discussed for Java based products such as WSAS & ESB. Myself and few others were also invited for this planning meeting, where this Java product unification was discusses, and to be frank, most of the discussion ideas “flew over” my head. However, the initiation to participate paid off few months later, as I ended up one of the drivers of this whole effort, towards the second half of 2008.
“Product unification” rationale was driven by simple rationale at the time, in 2008. We were building a middleware stack, but our own products did not work together. The products were in silos. The example used at the time to explain the problem was the way we secured a service. In WSAS, there was a nice UI that could be used to secure a service, but the ESB could not re-use the same as it was. Why not, why cannot we use the same technique? How can we make the cross cutting concerns available across the products rather than re-doing them over and over again?
These discussions, which started in the 2008 off-site planning meeting, evolved in the months to follow. OSGi came to the picture as a result. No one in engineering knew what OSGi meant for the platform at the time and there was none except Paul who believed that it would work. So there was resistance first, then fighting, and then came the CEOs verdict, lets just do it and see how it goes.
So we did, we just did it. And while doing, we figured how to do it, we brought in OSGi trainers, and we figured how to adopt OSGi into the product platform. And by fourth quarter of 2008, we had figured for the most part, the advantages of OSGi and how it is going to make our middleware platform a “platform”.
I consider the move from siloes of products into a product platform a key evolutionary step in WSO2 software. But over the past three years, we have evolved at an exponential phase. In 2009 February, we released only four products. Today, we have 14 products, and 12 Stratos services.
The invention of the Carbon platform made WSO2 DNA much more agile and adoptive to change. This is evident from what we have build on top of Carbon in the past three years. The most note worthy is the introduction of cloud native elements into Carbon and the creation of WSO2 Stratos. We started the cloud effort in Q4 2009. Today, using a single Carbon code base, you can use the same app on-premise, on private or public cloud using WSO2 platform.
In addition to cloud native aspects, there are many other enhancements on the platform, done over the past three years. P2 based dynamic provisioning, advanced governance capabilities, dynamic discovery, platform wide cashing, clustering, auto-scaling, advanced deployment synchronization, and Eclipse based tooling are just few of those advancements.
It took loads of team work, loads of hard work to build this unprecedented platform ground up. But all those hard work has paid off already, as you can see from the progress WSO2 has made in the past three years. And what is lined up for 2012 by WSO2, will still prove the power of this software masterpiece.
Stay tuned…!
Comments