Quick Start Guide

WSO2 Private PaaS (PPaaS) is an enterprise grade Platform as a Service (PaaS) that delivers standard, on-premise, application, integration, data, identity, governance, and analytics PaaS solutions for IT projects. WSO2 PPaaS can be deployed on Docker using Kubernetes or on a Virtual Machine using one of the following IaaS that supports Apache jclouds, namely EC2, GCE and OpenStack. At the core of WSO2 PPaaS lies Apache Stratos providing cloud-native capabilities, such as multi-tenancy, elastic scaling, self-service provisioning, cloud bursting, network partitioning, metering, billing and resource pooling among several other functionalities. More significantly, it also adds functionality to host pre-integrated, fully multi-tenant WSO2 Carbon middleware products as cartridges that deliver a range of cloud PaaS services where in PPaaS, a cartridge is a virtual machine (VM) on an IaaS or a container on Kubernetes, which has software components to interact with PPaaS.

This Quick Start guide explains how to deploy PPaaS using the demo EC2 AMI, deploy a sample application, and view statistics.

About the demo EC2 AMI

Understanding the key concepts in PPaaS

Let's take a look at some of the key concepts and terminology in PPaaS:

Network Partitions

Deployment Policy

Auto-scaling Policy

Kubernetes Cluster

Cartridge

Cartridge Groups

Application Policy

Application

Let's go through the basic use cases of PPaaS:

• Launching the preconfigured PPaaS instance using the Demo EC2 AMI
• Viewing the artifacts related to the sample application
• Deploying a sample application
• Viewing the application topology
• Viewing metering service information

Launching the preconfigured PPaaS instance using the demo EC2 AMI

Follow the instructions below to launch the preconfigured PPaaS instance using the demo EC2 AMI:

1. Navigate to http://aws.amazon.com/console/ and sign in to the AWS Management Console. 
   
2. Click EC2 on the home console.
3. In the region drop-down list, select Asia Pacific (Singapore), which is the region where the demo instance is located.
   

4. Identify your AWS access key ID and secret key as follows:

   1. On the EC2 account details menu, click My Account.
   2. Click Security Credentials on the left-bar menu.
   3. Switch to the Access Keys tab.
   4. Create an access key for this setup. Then note the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, which you'll need later.
      

5. Create a security group with rules that define the allowed port ranges, thereby identifying which incoming network traffic is delivered to your instance (all other traffic is ignored):

   1. On the Network and Security menu, click Security Groups.
   2. Click Create Security Group.

   3. Enter the name and description of the security group.

   4. Repeat the following steps to add two security group rules to open all the UDP and TCP ports:  

      1. Click Add Rule under the Inbound section.

      2. Select the following rule types individually:

         • All TCP
         • All UDP

         The port range gets automatically set as follows:

         Rule type	Port range
         All TCP	0 - 65535
         All UDP	0 - 65535

      3. Set the source as Anywhere 0.0.0.0/0.

         Note that setting the source to 0.0.0.0/0 is a demo-only setting, which must be changed for security purposes in a production environment. For more information, see Amazon EC2 Security Groups. 

         

         The security group rules that you added above are only for demo purposes. In a production environment, you should add individual rules with the following ports for security purposes.

         9443 - HTTPS 9763 - HTTP 9444 - HTTPS (DAS) 7611 - Thrift

         7612 - Secure Thrift 8081 - HTTP (Spark manager) 11500 - HTTP (Spark worker) 5672 - TCP (AMQP)

         8672 - Secure TCP (AMQP) 1883 - TCP (MQTT) 8883 - Secure TCP (MQTT)

   5. Click Create.

6. Create a key pair and download it as follows:

   1. On the Network and Security menu, click Key Pairs.
   2. Click Create New Key Pair.
      
   3. Enter a name for your key pair.
   4. Click Create. The key pair gets automatically downloaded as a .pem file.
   5. Save your private key in a safe place on your computer, and make note of the location so you can easily find it later.
7. Navigate to the EC2 Dashboard.
   
8. Click Launch Instance and then click Community AMIs.

9. Search for ami-323dfa51 and click Select.

   Note that this demo AMI is only available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. 

   

10. Select an instance type for the deployment. We recommend the m3.large instance type for the WSO2 PPaaS deployment.

    

11. Click Next: Configure Instance Details. 

12. Click Advanced Details to expand the tab, and then enter payload parameters for the demo AMI in the User data field. You need to specify the following list of parameters as comma-separated key-value pairs.

    • EC2_IDENTITY - Access key ID for EC2 API.

    • EC2_SECRET  - Secret access key for EC2 API.

    • EC2_OWNER_ID - EC2 user's owner ID.

    • EC2_SECURITY_GROUP - Security group name that you created.

    • EC2_KEY_PAIR - EC2 key for accessing the instances via SSH.

    • EC2_BASE_AMI - Base image for cartridge instances. The recommended value is as follows:

      EC2_BASE_AMI=ap-southeast-1/ami-9232f5f1

    • EC2_INSTANCE_TYPE - EC2 instance type for the cartridge instances. The recommended value is as follows:

      EC2_INSTANCE_TYPE=m3.medium

    • EC2_REGION - The EC2 region for spawning cartridge instances. Use the following value:

      EC2_REGION=ap-southeast-1

    • EC2_AVAILABILITY_ZONE_ID_1 - The EC2 availability zone for spawning the cartridge instances. Use the following value:

      EC2_AVAILABILITY_ZONE_ID_1=ap-southeast-1a

    • EC2_AVAILABILITY_ZONE_ID_2 - The EC2 availability zone for spawning the cartridge instances. Use the following value:

      EC2_AVAILABILITY_ZONE_ID_2=ap-southeast-1b

    • EC2_TAG_USER - This EC2 tag is added to the cartridge instances under the key "User".

      The following is a sample payload:

      EC2_IDENTITY=XXX,EC2_SECRET=YYY,EC2_OWNER_ID=ZZZ,EC2_SECURITY_GROUP=allowall,EC2_KEY_PAIR=KKK,EC2_BASE_AMI=ap-southeast-1/ami-9232f5f1,EC2_INSTANCE_TYPE=m3.medium,EC2_REGION=ap-southeast-1,EC2_AVAILABILITY_ZONE_ID_1=ap-southeast-1a,EC2_AVAILABILITY_ZONE_ID_2=ap-southeast-1b,EC2_TAG_USER=Akila

      Add your actual values in the above payload template and paste the above text in the user data field.

    

13. Click Next: Add Storage. You do not need to add or select any storage configurations.

    

14. Click Next: Tag Instance. You do not need to add any tags for the EC2 instance.

    

15. Click Next: Configure Security Group, click the Select an existing security group option and then click the security group that you created.

    

16. Click Review and Launch. After reviewing the instance, click Review and Launch. 

17. Enter the key pair when prompted. 

    

18. Select the acknowledgement and click Launch Instances.

    After you successfully configure the EC2 instance, it redirects you to the page that includes all the instances. It takes a short time for an instance to launch. Until then, the status of the instance will appear as pending. After the instance is launched, the status will change to running.

19. Log in to the PPaaS Console (https://<PUBLIC_IP>:9443/console) using the default credentials (username=admin and password=admin).

    To log into the PPaaS Console, get the public IP of the WSO2 Private PaaS demo instance that appears in the EC2 dashboard. For example, if your public IP is  54.179.152.92, access the PPaaS Console using the following URL: https://54.179.152.92:9443/console

    

    Note the PPaaS dashboard that appears. The Monitoring tile appears here because PPaaS has been configured with WSO2 DAS in the demo AMI for monitoring and metering purposes.

    

Viewing the artifacts related to the sample application

The PPaaS EC2 demo AMI is preconfigured in a manner, so that when the instance is launched all the artifacts, namely network partition, autoscaling policy, deployment policy, cartridge and application policy, which correspond to the application are created automatically. To learn more on the latter mentioned artifacts, see Understanding the key concepts in PPaaS.

Lets view the details of an artifact.

1. Click Configurations in the PPaaS dashboard. 
2. Click on the respective artifact. For example, if you want to view details of the network partition, click Network Partition.
3. Move your cursor over the available network partition tile and click Details in the popup menu. 
4. If you wish to view the respective artifact definition JSON, click Toggle View.
   

Deploying a sample application

Let's deploy one of the sample applications.

1. Click Applications in the PPaaS dashboard. 
   
2. Move your cursor over the wso2bps-350-application tile and click Deploy in the popup menu to deploy the BPS application. 
   In WSO2 PPaaS, an application is referred to as a composite application for the purpose of grouping a set of cartridges together. When you deploy the application, PPaaS creates the relevant instances based on the application definition. When working with a worker manager cartridge, it will include worker nodes and a manager node where the worker node serves the requests received by clients, and a manager node deploys and configures artifacts. In this use case, if we consider an application that uses the wso2bps-350-application worker manager cartridge, which has a cartridgeMin of 2 and 1 for the worker and manager respectively, and if we assume that there is a startup order as well, where the workers should start before the manager; first PPaaS will create two worker nodes, based on the minimum count that is specified in the application definition. If it is in a Virtual Machine (VM) scenario, which is in EC2, PPaaS will spawn two worker nodes. If it is in a Kubernetes scenario, PPaaS will create two pods. After the spawned nodes become active, PPaaS will spawn the manager node.

Viewing the application topology

Immediately after an application is deployed, all the nodes will initially be in the created state, and gradually when the nodes in the clusters come up and become active, they will move to the active state. You can see this transition when viewing the respective application topology.

Let's view an application topology.

1. Click Applications in the PPaaS dashboard. 
2. Move your cursor over the deployed wso2bps-350-application application tile and click View in the popup menu. 
    

Viewing metering service information

Metering is useful for analyzing how PPaaS utilizes IaaS resources. For example, it helps you view how many instances were spawned, the duration the instances were spawned for, and more. You will need this information to bill customers based on their resource consumption.

Let's view the metering service information related to a deployed application. PPaaS uses a WSO2 Data Analytics Server (DAS) analytics dashboard to provide metering service information.

1. Move your cursor to the application icon in the topology view and click Show Usage to access the DAS gadget.

    

2. If you are prompted, log in using the default user credentials (username=admin and password=admin). 
   The metering dashboard displays all the member life-cycle events (e.g., member started, activated, terminated, etc.) that occurred for this application, where members correspond to the instances spawned by PPaaS.

    

Viewing monitoring details of services

Monitoring is useful for analyzing the health status of each member and cluster, as it provides details on the memory usage, load average, and in-flight requests. Monitoring will also show you details regarding the instances that are scaled.

Let's view the monitoring details of the services. PPaaS uses a WSO2 Data Analytics Server (DAS) analytics dashboard to provide monitoring service information.

1. Click Monitoring in the PPaaS dashboard. 

   

What's next?