WSO2 Helps Customers Cut Costs by Over 50% with Development and Authentication Platforms on AWS

Founded in Sri Lanka in 2005, WSO2 delivers enterprise integration, API management, and identity and access management software. Each year, businesses, universities, and governments around the world use WSO2 software to execute over 60 trillion transactions and manage more than 1 billion identities.

WSO2’s cloud-based offerings have been running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) from day one. Nuwan Dias, vice president and deputy chief technology officer, API management and integration at WSO2, recalls, “We chose AWS because it is the most mature cloud provider and offers the widest range of services. We’ve reached more customers thanks to AWS’s scalability and stability.”

In 2020, WSO2 sought to create a cloud-based internal developer platform-as-a-service (IDPaaS) in response to customer demand. “Moving to the cloud and piecing together various services and tools to build and manage your own platform is time-consuming and costly,” says Dias. “Most organizations want to focus on their applications, not on managing platforms.” Additionally, WSO2 customers were seeking a customer identity and access management (CIAM) software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

WSO2 developed two products using AWS—Choreo and Asgardeo—to meet customer needs. Choreo, an IDPaaS, helps developers integrate quickly with any application, data, or system. It also provides all the necessary services for developers to write code and deploy seamlessly. “We manage deployment, scaling, and API management through Choreo,” says Dias.

Asgardeo is a multi-tenant, SaaS-based CIAM solution that enables developers to access siloed customer data, providing insights to create engaging, data-driven customer experiences. Both Choreo and Asgardeo run on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and use Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) for storing and deploying container images. For security, WSO2 relies on AWS Secrets Manager for database credentials, AWS Network Firewall for network traffic control, and Amazon CloudWatch for system monitoring.

With Choreo and Asgardeo on AWS, WSO2 customers have both software engineering and delivery capabilities in the cloud. “Just running a service by itself isn’t sufficient for our customers to stay competitive—you need to provide authentication and authorization, routing, architectural support, and analytics as well,” Dias says. “Our solutions offer all those things in one platform.”

No longer needing to assemble their own platforms for building applications, WSO2 customers are reducing their total cost of ownership for development. “Developers using Choreo and Asgardeo on AWS can start writing code and move it to production immediately, saving time and eliminating much of the overhead typically required to set up and manage the environment,” says Dias. “This approach reduces development costs by more than fifty percent.”

WSO2 now provides developers with a self-service platform to build, deploy, and run applications without complex configurations. Choreo, for example, simplifies cloud-native software engineering through abstractions that reduce cognitive load. This way, developers don't have to worry about non-functional requirements like security perimeters, availability or scalability.

“Our platform is easy to use and requires minimal resources,” says Dias. “One of our customers has a three-person team deploying applications to the cloud. They didn’t need additional staff to get code into production. Instead of managing configurations and maintenance, the developers can focus on what they do best: building applications and bringing them to market faster.”

Developers using Asgardeo can easily build identity and access management into their applications while incorporating adaptive authentication. “Asgardeo sets up login rules for unfamiliar IP addresses and enables authentication across third-party apps,” Dias explains. “It simplifies building applications for these scenarios.”

WSO2 plans to expand its use of AWS for future products. “We’re exploring how to provide disaster recovery on AWS, for example,” says Dias. “Overall, we will continue using AWS services to support our products and features.”