10 reasons why WSO2 Platform is better than the rest
WSO2 offers open-source software products to build enterprise systems. There are 100s of other vendors that offer similar software products as open-source or proprietary. Then how do you make the choice?
Here are 10 reasons why WSO2 is better than the competition.
- Support for cloud-native, future-proof deployments
Most of the enterprises have started to embrace the advantages of containers over virtual machines. This demands every application that runs in the enterprise environment to be compatible with containers. Utilizing the advantages of containers/cloud platforms is called being cloud-native. WSO2 has started building cloud-native versions of its middleware stack even before the term cloud-native was introduced and kept on improving the product stack to gain the advantage of the same. Some of the key features of the WSO2 platform related to cloud-native advantage are mentioned below.
- Micro-Gateway and Micro-Integrator runtimes are designed for container platforms with quick startup times and reduced memory footprint
- Provide docker, Kubernetes, and many other container-based platform resources to ease the deployment of WSO2 components in any selected platform
- Kubernetes operators built for tighter integration with the Kubernetes ecosystem directly from the runtimes
2. Streaming integration helps to build real-time, event-driven architectures
With enterprise “data” becoming the most valuable asset, processing data in real-time is becoming a major requirement of the middleware stack. Technologies like Kafka has become the leaders in building event-driven architecture that supports real-time data processing. WSO2’s streaming integration component integrates well with event brokers like Kafka and adds great value to the event-driven architecture with advanced stream processing technologies like filtering, cleansing, transformation, aggregation, and more. Here are some of the key capabilities of the streaming integration component.
- Integrate with event sources like Kafka, NATS, Databases, Files and process events in real-time and publish results to target systems
- Ability to connect with 60+ event sources and target systems in real-time
- Real-time ETL and Streaming Data Integration support with CDC (Change Data Capture), large file processing
3. Better ROI and reduced TCO fits the most organization’s IT budget to get started with the digital transformation effort
One of the challenges with starting off new IT initiatives to replace old technology platforms is to get budget approvals. Since most of these initiatives like API programs, digital transformation projects, and hybrid integration projects take a bit of time (1–3 years) to show the return on investment, getting approvals for million-dollar investment can be really challenging. Instead, most enterprises would find it easier to start with a small budget and then grow with the time once the returns are visible to business leaders as well as to the entire organization. WSO2’s transparent, simple cost model allows most of the IT projects to get started without spending a fortune of money to just prove the technology. It offers the full feature set from the beginning with its open-source version having the same feature set as the licensed version.
- A simple pricing model based on CPU cores and/or transaction volumes that charge customers only for production workloads while providing 3 pre-production environments free
- Enterprise connectors are included in the subscription without any additional cost
- On-premise, IaaS deployment options are available without any additional cost
4. Support for modern protocols like gRPC, graphQL, and WebSocket allows users to build effective microservices platforms
With the increased demand for information access from consumers, enterprise architects have gone beyond the traditional HTTP based services to build more efficient, high-performing services with protocols like gRPC, graphQL, and WebSocket. These modern protocols are becoming increasingly popular in microservices teams and supporting these protocols is one of the key requirements of a middleware platform in such a situation. WebSocket allows building real-time, streaming APIs that can provide data as and when changes are happening at the back end. GraphQL allows users to request the data from APIs based on their needs rather than getting data that the system needs to expose via a static API. GRPC allows users to build platform-independent, high-performance client-server interactions with a data-centered approach with protocol buffers. WSO2 supports integrating with these protocols seamlessly.
- Advanced security for graphQL endpoints
- Ability to build streaming APIs with WebSocket
- Integrate with modern microservices over gRPC
5. A comprehensive platform with built-in Integration, API management, and Identity and Access Management capabilities to build an integrated API supply chain
Building an efficient supply chain for physical products had revolutionized the manufacturing industry in the 20th century. APIs are the products of the 21st century. Hence, building an integrated API supply chain would eventually revolutionize the software industry. WSO2 platform offers 3 main components for building an integrated API ecosystem with its API Manager, Integration, and Identity Server products that are built on one single codebase with unique features related to each domain.
- A single platform with 3 pillars for digital transformation
- Easier onboarding of developers into the platform due to a single base platform (carbon)
- The only platform that leads in all 3 technology areas
6. Excellent support for building automated CICD pipelines with a wide variety of automation technologies
Enterprise middleware products like ESBs, Application Servers were designed to run for several months (even years) without much of a change. Those products were reluctant to change in the past and the teams who managed these tools had the same mindset. With the introduction of SOA and Microservices, this attitude has changed a lot and teams have started to appreciate the ability to adopt changes in a frequent manner more often than ever before. A great enterprise platform is a connected ecosystem that consists of backend legacy services, microservices, integration platforms, API platforms, etc. When it comes to automating the platform, the entire ecosystem should support the automation tools and should be capable of becoming a part of a larger CICD pipeline. WSO2 platform provides excellent support for automation tools and building an integrated pipeline.
- Provides resources for puppet, ansible, terraform, and several other configuration management, automation technologies
- Integrated CICD pipeline based on the GitOps concept where changing code or configuration resulted in executing the same automated pipeline
- Supports deployment into major IaaS providers through automation scripts available for AWS, Azure, and GCP
7. Increase business ROI with a reusable platform with API monetization support
Most API projects and Digital transformation efforts are IT-driven. Having the right level of business involvement from the beginning of these projects makes it easier to align these projects with the business goals rather than defining its own goals that are not related to the business. A platform that promotes the reusability of services and APIs increases the ROI in multiple ways including cost reduction, better time to market, and opening up new business opportunities. In addition to that, some APIs can be exposed as monetized APIs to gain the benefits directly from the platform. WSO2’s built-in features for API reuse and monetization allow enterprises to build successful IT projects that won’t shut down after some time due to a lack of business value.
- Feature-rich developer portal allows internal as well as external API consumers to reuse APIs rather than rebuild
- Increased reuse results in reduced time to market
- Realization of projects that had previously stalled or were difficult to stand up
- API monetization allows generating revenue directly from the APIs
8. WSO2 offers the best enterprise-level product support
WSO2 has a unique culture where engineers who develop the products goes through various positions within their career. They become developers for the most part while they also work as support engineers, pre-sales engineers as well as evangelists within their career. Because of this culture, at any given time, there is a good set of engineers who developed the product will act as support engineers and help customers with providing quick resolutions to the issues customers face. At the same time, they enable the other support engineers with the product knowledge through enablement sessions and most support engineers become contributors to the products as well. This connected engineering culture allows the WSO2 support team to provide the highest level of support when things go haywire in a customer environment.
9. Advanced API security with Artificial Intelligence (AI) support
With the increased usage of APIs to expose business data related to various domains ranging from financials, healthcare, retail, banking, and many others, it has become one of the common targets of malicious users or hackers. Due to this reason, providing static policy-based security for APIs would not be sufficient for your enterprise platform. In such cases, more advanced security capabilities based on modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) can come to rescue. WSO2 has partnered with one of the leading API security vendors in PingIntelligence to build API security mechanisms with features mentioned below.
- Credential stuffing attacks on login systems
- Layer 7 DDoS attacks that scrape data and disrupt API services
- Taking over accounts using stolen cookies, tokens, or API keys
- Rogue insiders exfiltrating data in small amounts over extended periods of time
10. Supports on-premise, private-cloud, hybrid deployment choices with support for multi-cloud deployments without additional cost or complexity
Enterprise platforms are going through major transformations within the last few years due to various reasons. Most of those initiatives are revolving around efficient resource utilization, cost reduction, higher performance, lesser management overhead to name a few. If your middleware platform is designed in a way that can only support few deployment options, then you face a lot of challenges when these sorts of requirements come as part of wider organization level efforts. Having a middleware stack that supports multitudes of deployment choices with lesser complexity and cost can become invaluable in such situations.
- Most of the existing integration platforms are designed to work well as an iPaaS platform where the management plane runs within the vendor-hosted cloud where runtime can run on cloud or on-premise
- Any deployment choice that requires full access to management and runtime components becomes complex and harder to manage with additional cost with these vendors
- WSO2 supports fully cloud, on-premise, hybrid and multi-cloud deployment approaches without any additional complexity or cost since the runtimes as well as management components can run on anywhere within the full control of the user
