Tag Archives: OIC

Integration Cloud or SOA Suite?

02 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by in Cloud, General, OIC - ICS, Oracle, Technology

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A periodic conversation I get involved is the the relationship between Oracle’s SOA Suite and Integration Cloud. We’ve long held a view based on our conversations with Oracle product management.

There is a formal statement of direction for SOA Suite available ….

Click to access fusion-middleware-statement-of-direction.pdf

The bottom line as we read it:

  • SOA Suite isn’t going to be scrapped and customers will not be forced onto Integration Cloud.
  • Future changes are going to be on making transitions easier to the cloud, and a customer decision to adopt OIC.
  • Releases will focus on keeping things up to date and aligned with the underlying technologies from Java 8 to Java 11 as a long term release of Java. WebLogic version updates.
  • We’ll see mechanisms to cloud deliver integrations as the primary focus.
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Meetup – magic of correlations in SOA, BPM and Oracle Integration Cloud

30 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by in Cloud, Dev Meetup, OIC - ICS, Oracle, Technology

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Earlier this month as part of the Virtual Oracle Developer Meetups, we were very fortunate to have Oracle Ace, Martien van den Akker present on the subject of the magic of correlations in SOA, BPM, and Oracle Integration Cloud. Martien not only presents to the Oracle community but also is very active on the Oracle community sites (community.oracle.com and Cloud Customer Connect) sharing his wealth of knowledge. When it comes to the tough questions about Oracle middleware tech on these platforms, you stand a good chance that Martien will be the one answering your question.

This insightful presentation not only addressed the traditional Oracle Integration approach using SOA and BPM but also contrasted the capabilities as provided by Oracle Cloud. Martien was generous enough to allow us to record the presentation and share it (below), along with the demo resources from:

Martien also blogs at https://blog.darwin-it.nl/ which contains a wealth of insightful articles – recommended reading.

OGB Appreciation Day : Support of Hybrid

11 Friday Oct 2019

Posted by in General, Oracle, Technology

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This is my blog post as part of the Oracle Ground Breakers Appreciation Day (more about this with oracle-base) isn’t about a specific product or feature but an approach or possibly two approaches that exist with many of the PaaS services available from Oracle.

One of the key things that many of Oracle’s products such as Integration Cloud, API Platform and the foundation of Functions (Fn) and Containers is the recognition that many organisations are not so fortunate to be cloud-born, or even working with a cloud-native model for IT. For those organisations who would rather have across location unifying approach, Oracle cloud is not a closed capability like AWS, whilst products like Integration Cloud are at their best on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, they can be executed in your data centre, or even another cloud.

Whilst the teams I work with experiment and build our service offerings ‘on Oracle’, when we engage with customers to help them with their specific problem spaces, we are more often than not operating in a multi-cloud or on-premises hybrid model.

This hybrid story is helped with a renewed vigour for open source both contributing to but also leading the development of open source. In addition to providing free tiers to some of their stack such as Functions, IaaS and Database (here). Many do forget the Oracle JVM is free as long as you keep up to date, you have got a small footprint Oracle database for free (XE), MySQL is part of the Oracle family. Then many of the modern development technologies are true to the core open-source, Blockchain, Container Engine meaning that the solutions on these layers are portable, can be run on-prem. Yes, Oracle adds value by wrapping these cores with tooling and features that make easier rather than diverging with proprietary Ingress controllers for example.

The irony is that organisations that tend to be associated with a low cost or being faithful to open source goals actually can end up locking you in and appear to be moving away from the original open-source ideals. Consider RedHat, the champion for a lot of open source-based enablement have removed Kubernetes from the official RedHat downloads for their Linux in-favour of a single node license of OpenShift, to get Kubernetes of RHEL you have to go outside of the normal binary source channels (other challenges are documented here).

London Oracle Developer Meetup – OIC Patterns and more

09 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Dev Meetup, drone, General, Oracle, Technology

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This Meetup was put together quickly as it presented an opportunity to align with other events happening in the Oracle offices. Despite the relatively short notice we a turn out that really made great use of our speaker – Sid Joshi who walked through the Enterprise Level patterns supported by Oracle’s Integration Cloud (OIC) including a demo showing how PaaS4SaaS worked using Service Cloud and OIC making use of VBCS and integration (formerly ICS) parts of the API Platform.

As with all the meet-ups we allow the discussions to flow freely. So, the conversation probed different aspects of OIC. So with the follow up on Several Capgemini use cases of OIC that have won the team awards.

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You can see these use cases here. Sid’s presentation is available AppIntegrationPatterns_MeetUp. Additional resources can also be obtained from https://oracle-integration.cloud

As the conversation has focused on OIC and the use cases rather than our ongoing Drones with APIs stories, I have had an interesting follow on discussion about the application of drones.  The drone story has many threads.  The initial driver for the work on the drone has been about bringing something interesting and distinctive to the meetup.  The drone is very tangible, and the source of amusement which makes the meetups a lot more fun.

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Integrating API Management with the rest of your Development Pipeline

30 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in API Platform CS, APIs & microservices, General, OIC - ICS, Oracle, Technology

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Oracle API Management keeps API policy configuration and management internalized for a number of reasons including security (after all you don’t want your security rules for APIs out in the open).  The Platform does provide simple versioning.  But you need to able to link the policies to the back end implementations – so the policy configuration is aligned to what is implemented. For example you don’t want the policy to accept parameters that your back end can’t handle in version 1, but does in version 2 of your solution. I have blogged about some of these considerations in the past here.

We have had the good fortune to sit and discuss the challenges of how API configurations could be managed with Flexagon. As a result of our input and from others Flexdeploy has a number of new features making the configuration management of APIs very easy. In addition to this is further simplifying gateway deployment processes. When combined with a very powerful CI/CD that can handle traditional development, microservices and development with integration products such as like SOA Suite and OIC a huge amount of flexibility is made available enabling configuration management, multi environment deployments.

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Flexagon have started a series of blogs on the subject – recommend checking them out – here.

A busy 25 hours at UKOUG Conference

05 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by in General, OIC - ICS, Oracle, Technology

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I’ve just come to the end of a very busy 25 hours at the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) Conference in Birmingham. Four presentations – interestingly the same subject area, that of Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) / Integration Cloud Service (ICS) started and ended the day.  Between this we also covered some approaches to start working towards Microservices in a Monolith World and Oracle Messaging Cloud.

Below are the presentations on the Microservices and ICS/OIC. The piece on Oracle Messaging Cloud was largely demo based, so rather than sharing the presentation slides, which won’t tell you too much. The best way to find out about this is to read the 2 articles about the capability in the OraWorld magazine (issues 6 & 7). With issue 7 perfectly timed by becoming available in the last couple of days.

With the Oracle Messaging Cloud article, there is one word of caution. When the article was written and submitted I used a free cloud service (which using contemporary terminology we’d describe as Serverless) called WebScript.io.  The WebScript piece served to make it easy to consume the webservice calls illustrating the PushListener feature.  This service however is being closed down – a shame as it was an elegantly simple solution.  Given this I am currently working on a blog post which will show how another services can take the place of WebScript.io; whilst not finalised, this maybe Google Cloud Functions.

If this wasn’t enough we also squeezed in the keynote presentations, a meeting with several other contributors to OMESA (Open Modern Enterprise Software Architecture) , a lunch conversation with our Publisher (Packt) and several other Oracle book authors, Oracle Ace dinner (great food with a lot of brilliant & friendly people), some very valuable incidental conversations and some work for a customer.

Microservices in a Monolith World

Look at Oracle Integration Cloud – its relationship to ICS. Customer use Cases an Insight into why ICS

I’ll be presenting at UKOUG Conference with …

18 Saturday Nov 2017

Posted by in General, Oracle

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I will be presenting at the UKOUG Conference this year as an Oracle Ace and Snr Consultant from a award winning Partner of the Year. I’ll be speaking about:

  • ICS (now part of Oracle Integration Cloud)
  • Microservices and WebLogic
  • Oracle Messaging Cloud Service

I also have colleagues from Capgemini covering IaaS and SaaS among other things. I hope that we see you in Birmingham. Full details of my sessions :

Integration Cloud Service (ICS) Customer use Cases an Insight Into why ICS

04/12/2017 09:00 &

05/12/2017 09:00

In this session the presenters will talk about several applications of Integration Cloud Service (ICS) with customers from Capgemini. Whilst presenting the use cases, the reasoning for adopting ICS over other integration options will be explained and some of the design considerations that had to be addressed in the application of ICS. Whilst looking at the example cases, factors involved in deciding which iPaaS offering to adopt based on needs.
This session will be presented by Phil Wilkins one of the authors of the book Implementing Oracle Integration Cloud Service and supporting blog.

Microservices in a Monolith World

04/12/2017 15:25

Whilst microservices are mainstream thinking, many organisations make significant long term investments in application containers such as WebLogic and can be resistant to moving on from such investments. So how do we realise the microservice thinking with such constraints? This presentation looks at several approaches that can allow us to leverage microservice thinking without sacrificing the existing investment.

Why Should I Consider Oracle Messaging Cloud Service as an Integration Solution?

04/12/2017 17:55

Oracle Messaging Cloud Service is an often-overlooked service in the family of iPaaS options, but why? So, what makes it worth considering and makes it more contemporary than JMS with Java Cloud Service? This presentation will look at what differentiates MCS from JCS and Event Hub and others and does it offer that makes it distinct and worthwhile option?