Multiple WSO2 Carbon instances VS single Stratos environment - which approach is better?

Question

I want to build an environment with the following WSO2 components:

• Enterprise Service Bus
• Data Services Server
• Identity Server
• Business Activity Monitor
• Governance Registry

So far, I have found out that this could be achieved by one of the following approaches:

1. Multiple carbon instances (in this case 5) with different WSO2 components
2. Single carbon instance with installed features of every of the required WSO2 components (for example, installed on top of WSO2ESB)
3. Single Stratos instance with installed features of every of the required WSO2 components

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using particular approaches? Which one is usually recommended?

The aspects I am most interested in are: ease of development/configuration, scalability and performance.

In the long run, the environment will probably be set up on a single remote linux virtual machine (therefore, sort of a cloud environment).

Answer 1

• (3) You take the biggest advantage of Stratos when multitenancy is a requirement in your project. Otherwise, you will face some feature overhead, and also this environment is initially harder to set up properly.
• (2) IMHO you would have to install so many features that the server would be huge. If there was some problem, the whole server could eventually crash.
• (1) I would start with this approach to keep things simple. If you need to scale, you could add more instances of one type, and add some load balancer to the arquitecture.

Answer 2

I just use (2) in this way:

I merge the ESB with DSS or AS fo example.

BAM with CEP if Complex Events is a requeriment.

And leave IS and GREG alone.