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Tag Archives: SOA Suite

Integration Cloud or SOA Suite?

02 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by mp3monster in Cloud, General, OIC - ICS, Oracle, Technology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ICS, integration, OIC, Oracle, SOA, SOA Suite

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.
Continue reading →

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Oracle SOA Cloud

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Oracle, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

"SOA CS", API, API Management, Cloud, JCS, Oracle, OUG, SOA, SOA Suite

It has been a while coming but the Oracle SOA Cloud was announced yesterday. Surprisingly, the fanfare for this key product hasn’t been held back for Oracle Open World which is only a few weeks away now. So no more building SOA on top of the Java Cloud Service. Along with SOA CS (Cloud Service) is API Management. But the release of information with yesterday’s announcement is coming quickly – for example UKOUG are running an innovation day which has had SOA Cloud session included in it.  Here are a few resources that I’ve seen so far :

  • SOA Cloud Service by Simon Haslam
  • Oracle Blog
  • Overview Video & Overview Playlist Videos
  • Data Sheet

It looks like from the details available that SOA Cloud includes the core composites, BPEL and OSB pieces, but BAM, Scheduling, B2B are yet to be released.

The Oracle Customer Advisory Board on the end of Open World should be a very interesting day.

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From AIA to SOA Suite 12c

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

12c, AIA, AIA Foundation Pack, canonical model, OAGI, OER, Oracle, Oracle SOA Suite, PIP, SOA Suite, WLST

Oracle has elected to move away from offering AIA Foundation Pack in its current form. Many of the features offered are being offered in a different packaging – predominantly SOA 12c Core Extensions, and some of the tooling which has not been heavily used will not be available in 12c.

AIA 11g Foundation Pack then it will be replaced by Oracle SOA Suite 12c Core Extensions via a SOA Suite 12c upgrade process for those who have already licensed it. The key consideration is the changes in feature availability in on premise upgrades and the ability to exploit all the tooling particularly into the SOA cloud is unlikely in the future.

Based on this we would recommended that any capabilities not offered natively in 12c should be retired from use, to remove potential issues as a result of upgrading or adopting  a  lift and shift cloud strategy. There is 1 possible caveat to this in the form of utilising the AIA canonical model, more on this  below. The sections shows how AIA capabilities have been re-aligned and you might move forwards.

A lot of the UI features have moved to products such as the Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER 12c) as a result the retirement of the Lifecycle Workbench and a few features have been retired.

Reference Process Models

Reference Process Models, are more aligned to the process of solution analysis and design. The capabilities here can be obtained from other tooling. Separating out process models from a product that is more technically aligned makes sense. We would recommend you want to look at process models in a solution independent capability – particularly as your processes maybe split across platforms and products and even between on-premise and the cloud.

Personally I have seen little use of the top down business process models wrapped up by AIA outside of prepackaged PIPs where process models have been considered they have been examined by business architects before determining by the technologists the delivery approach.

Common Objects

The canonical model piece is lost in the transition to 12c. The canonical model is presented through a series of XML Schemas and HTML documentation, so could be packaged up and continued to be used irrespective of of the SOA versioning – subject to ensuring no licensing constraint on where the schemas are applied that might prevent them being used in the SOA cloud for example.

If there are to be constraints around carrying schemas forward then a strategy of migrating to another broad canonical model such as OAGI  would be recommended. OAGI is particularly appealing given it strongly influenced AIA’s model but also their specialist domains leverage it as base definitions for example HR Open Standards.

Composite Application Validation System (CAVS)

CAVS provided a means by which it is possible to build integration tests that exercise composite components. This component could be leveraged by any Continuous Integration infrastructure. We have done this in the past before Oracle’s significant progress in adopting Maven and Hudson.

This is now part of the SOA Suite Core Extensions pack.

AIA Error Handling Framework (AIA-EH) including Resubmission Feature and Logging

This provides the common error management framework that can be extended to provide automated error handling – for example delay for a period and retry. This one of the most valuable capabilities offered in terms of functionality as it provides a unified framework on which you can do basic error trapping and retry to far more complex advanced capabilities. As part of 12c this has been advanced as well.

This is now part of the SOA Suite Core Extensions pack.

AIA Deployment Plans

Deployment plans tooling has now gone as the deployment mechanism (AID) has also been dropped. More on this below.

XSL Mapping Analyzer & reporting(XMan)

This tool provided the means to identify and understand how mappings have been customised or extended from base. This has been superseded by the Mapping Editor tooling in 12c which offers a better approach to this activity.

AIA Installation Driver & AIA Installer properties

This capability wrapped up a series of smaller WLST based processes to deploy a PIP either licensed or custom PIP. As the concept of custom PIP has been dropped in favour of a collection of composites and other artefacts as would be applied if building using just SOA Suite. The capabilities use within Specsavers’ has in the past been shown to be mixed with some people preferring the SOA deployment approach rather than the wrapped up AIA mechanism.

PIP Auditor

The PIP auditor was provided AIA 11g as a means to perform a health check on the configuration of a PIP including custom PIPs. Whilst  it is possible also include this tool into a Continuous Integration process  aide quality management it requires a lot of work to break the lengthy report into more manageable  . However this was not heavily adopted, and also not known to be used manually either, therefore the impact of not continuing its use is negligible.

Framework & Methodology

Still applicable as this is simply a set of architectural approaches utilising Oracle Middleware products such as SOA Suite

Project Life Cycle Workbench including AIA Artefact Generator

As a design tool this has been deprecated. However from a Specsavers viewpoint this has minimal impact as the workbench has not been heavily used in this form (this includes AIA Artefact Generator) as the elements can be generated manually by SOA during the development process.

As the above diagram shows, the life cycle processes are all underpinned by the development process itself.

With respect to the deployment of artefacts such as composites,DVMs etc this is still available through standard SOA mechanisms such WLST. Viewing deployed artefacts can still be done through various management consoles.

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Oracle SOA Components

20 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Licensing, Oracle, products, SOA, SOA Suite

Understanding all the different elements available to you with Oracle SOA Suite can be a little tricky to say the least as the often the building blocks available are shown in diagrams like:

As shown in http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/doc.1111/e10223/01_components.htm

They say a picture says a thousand words. But, those thousand words can omit some details.  Take this diagram for example, it only reflects the common elements in the main SOA server. But within the SOA license you also have Oracle Service Bus (OSB) and the Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine which run as separate servers.  Which means you’d see the following:

as shown in http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/doc.1111/e10223/04_osb.htm

as shown in http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/doc.1111/e10223/14_cep.htm

Oh, but hang on; we still haven’t got a representation of JMS, and Coherence.  JMS like CEP and OSB actually instantiates as a separate server as well.  So got a handle on everything now?  Well there is a little confusion still needing to be added to the mix.  The following diagram is commonly used showing interoperability with other products with separate licenses:

shown in http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/doc.1111/e10223/507_eda.htm

Taking the above diagram at face value, you could interpret things as actually you don’t have the CEP capability as it is the key part of the Oracle Event Driven Architecture Suite.

I have merged together the diagrams to show the bulk of all the SOA stack that comes into the main SOA license. As you can see ….

gs_1

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Microservices

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

AMQ, Apache, camel, karaf, Microservices, Oracle, OSB, Redhat, SOA Suite

Microservices are a hot topic at present. But microservices is neither a standard or a specific technology. Like REST it is more a set of ideas. So what constitutes a microservices. The best description I have come across yet has been by Martin Fowler ( http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html ).

We can focus down on a number of specific points that are central to the idea of Microservices:

  • the creation of small pieces of functionality that can be discretely deployed,
  • are connected typically by web APIs often using REST (but also seen using other abstracting protocols)
  • can be replaced with minimal dependency issues
  • microservices are typically built by small discrete teams usually in the range of 2-12 people (the so called 2 pizza rule)
  • services are usually orchestrated by dumb pipes (so publication/subscription strategies are often used, so the intelligence about how and what to do about each event is within the service not the orchestration).
  • design approach changes orientation from n-tier (presentation, orchestration/business logic, persistence) which could be described as horizontal separation to vertical separation where partitioning is functional/service centric (which internally may embody the horizontal partitioning but this is secondary and down to how the service delivery team wish to work).
  • Search service us running as their own CPU process – typically using container technologies such as Docker, Rocket, Spoon and Drawbridge
  • Any orchestration is dumb, the decisions of what to do and when to participate are taken by the service

The small container footprint (making the enforcement of the decoupling with minimal governance) means density of processes can remain high as the overhead compared to full VMs is a lot smaller but also means instantiating clean environments for fresh deployments and testing is very fast. This does not fit so well within many ESB environments such as Oracle’s SOA Suite as the pre-requisites create a substantial footprint that would need to reside within the container for the ESB (RedHat’s JBoss Fuse is one of the few exceptions if you consider the required footprint for Apache Camel for example).

However, some of the microcontainer principles can  be pursued within the larger ESB environments utilising capabilities such as :

  • Service Component Architecture (SCA) provides a means to create isolated versions of solutions that can run concurrently. By exploiting proper versioning and version dependency controls you can start pushing out different solution pieces with great ease.
  • Exposing composites via we services REST or WSDL based and adopt a more SOI approach to artefacts so don’t tap into DVMs directly use web services to perform the lookups
  • Microservice implementations have a number of NFRs characteristics that are not (atleast in my exerpience) often utilised when rich ESB frameworks such as
    • service compensation http://soapatterns.org/design_patterns/compensating_service_transaction
    • standard implementation of Tolerant Reader patterns –   http://servicedesignpatterns.com/WebServiceEvolution/TolerantReader (in conjunction with versioning patterns such as canonical versioning – http://soapatterns.org/design_patterns/canonical_versioning)

These approaches allow you adopt the dumb pipe approach (you don’t want services directly invoking each other except in case of utility services otherwise a lot of inter service dependency will build up). Using a publish & scribe framework or simple service sequencing we should be able to exploit OSB, Weblogic MQ in an Oracle Context and Weblogic as an OSGI container (for discovering technical services). In line with the Microservices ethos it would more than legitimate to build Microservices with other tools and then use an ESB like SOA Suite to provide the technology for weaving the services together.

In a Redhat product set there are more options as the solution footprints are smaller. But you would consider Karaf (OSGi container), Active MQ,and simple uses of Camel to weave microservices together.

With cloud middleware, adopting the goals of microservices will become easier as instantiating fresh environments and deployment approaches will become more akin to those of containers – for example Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) deployment is simply an import of a whole set of configuration and integration process information.

It should be noted that Microservices does fit better with a number of organisational and management approaches, such as:

  • dev ops – the build team carry the role of operational support
  • product centric rather than project centric life cycles i.e. the team exists as long as the product, rather than existing until all the current funded features are complete
  • works for build rather than buy delivery (buy is likely to introduce artefacts too large for a Microservice model).

Each microservice is likely to contain its own copy of data – potentially leading to greater data duplication – therefore data reconciliation checks and management thinking maybe be needed.

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JDeveloper 12c

29 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

11g, 12c, editor, JDeveloper, Oracle, SOA Suite, XSD

So I have been using JDeveloper 11g for a while and have to admit that I wasn’t a big fan finding a bit flaky and prone to crashing. The biggest driver to using it has been the fact that it offers a lot of XMLSpy like features without the stupidly high XMLSpy license costs.

With JDeveloper 12c arriving I took the opportunity to give it a go. Wow, is it so much better – quicker particularly during the startup cycle and way more reliable. The features around XSD editing haven’t significantly changed but just feels subtly easier to use.

With all the features around working with SOA Suite 12c and Weblogic 12c for core Oracle development I can imagine it is a huge step forward.

With the easier deployment of 12c getting PoC work done should be a lot easier. It’s just a shame still needs that huge 8GB footprint to do anything meaningful and my company laptop being a notebook (great for travelling with) doesn’t pack that punch and Oracle isn’t yet offering low cost SOA Suite deployments in the cloud yet.

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Oracle SOA Suite, AIA, PIPs and Fusion apps

23 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

AIA, Application Integration Architecture, FMW, fusion, middleware, Oracle, PIP, PIPs, Presentation, Process Integration Pack, slides, SOA, SOA Suite

I recently presented on the subject of Oracle middleware (FMW) with an emphasis on  SOA Suite, Application Integration Architecture (AIA), Process Integration Packs (PIPs) and Oracle Fusion Applications.  Below is a derivative of the presentation.  I’ve sought to identify how the technologies relate, and how Fusion applications relate to the non Fusion products.

For those trying to get to grips with this technology stack – you might find the notes useful as I’ve included plenty of links to associated information.

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Gaps in Oracle’s Cloud Cover? An Update

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by mp3monster in Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cloud, EPMVirtual, Oracle, SOA Suite, Verizon

So having written my blog entry Gaps in Oracle’s Cloud Cover? to things have popped up on my radar.  Firstly a message via LinkedIn from epmvirtual.com indicating that they could potentially assist (although EPM’s site only currently offer solutions around Hyperion online); and then the news item of Oracle and Verizon offering SOA in the cloud which reports that Verizon’s cloud solution (currently in Beta) offers SOA middleware cloud instances that can be rented by the hour (with bring your own license or rent license as well).  Verizon’s own announcement can be read here.   Bottomline – Verizon have beaten Oracle to the punch of offering Oracle’s own middleware in the cloud.  We’ll write more when there is something to share.

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Gaps in Oracle’s Cloud Cover?

20 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

AWS, Cloud, connector, development, integration, Oracle, Salesforce, SOA Suite

As an Enterprise Integration Architect I need to get my hands dirty with products such as Oracle’s SOA suite and AIA Foundation Pack.  In the past, I’ve dealt with this by talking with our infrastructure team – obtaining a VM or a laptop with sufficient guts to host SOA Suite (and it doesn’t have a small footprint).  This is all well and fine, but means I have to lug a big old laptop (our current standard laptop spec’s are lovely light machines with SSD’s but just don’t pack the punch for SOA Suite when it comes to memory) or have to leap through a series of security steps to get remote access – again not a problem unless I want to share my skunk works with someone outside the organisation.  Nor, do I really want to invest chunks of time building a SOA Suite environment to work with – I don’t do it enough to be able to throw these things together quickly.  Even Oracle recognise that with the support for a prebuilt VirtualBox with SOA Suite and BPM. The only problem with VirtualBox is I’ve saved on the build time, but still need that heavy laptop or remote access.

Oracle Cloud Java

With the rise of the cloud, particularly Oracle’s big push (announcements at Open World 2013), Amazon offering small footprint dev platforms more or less for free I thought we’d be able to get a PaaS deployment of SOA Suite – after all Oracle offer a range of Fusion Apps in the cloud (built on top of SOA Suite technologies), have launched development of Java and ADF solutions in their cloud and even offer Weblogic on Microsoft’s Azure.  How I wrong could I have been.  So I started looking around, perhaps someone has an AMI ready to go – well sort of if I want 10g.  So I’ve dug around, and found the odd provider who could deliver what was needed (e.g. Titan GS) but we’re talking big bucks – not a low cost dev/skunk works environment.  

This is very surprising really, and sort of ironic, given Oracle’s recent announcement for SaaS Adapters for the likes of SalesForce and WorkDay along with convenience tooling to connect to Oracle Cloud solutions such as HCM.  I say ironic, because to use the cloud adapters you can’t have a SaaS middleware; in fact the whitepaper Oracle published on Simplifying Cloud Integration infers/assumes that you’d be hosting your own middleware.  So if a midsized business has Has HCM, Taleo etc for their staffing management, SalesForce for the Sales/CRM operations and perhaps EBis or JD Edwards to move your business into the cloud you have to either go IaaS and carry the labour of maintaining the middleware platform or self host (one of the things the adoption of SaaS is trying to free you from).

All of this seems to be a really missed opportunity for Oracle.  If the oracle wants to host the world (and I think Larry Ellison would like that) and definitely get into that midmarket sector that JDEwards particularly tries to inhabit they need to make it easy for businesses to cloud all aspects of their IT solution, that includes orchestrating specialist solutions that will be hosted by someone other than Oracle (shock, horror). All of which means SOA Suite (and ideally AIA) need to be in the cloud.

As for my problem, its either the pain of building something on Amazon or setting up several copies of the VirtualBox deployment linked to a common GIT repository, and hope those I would like to collaborate with can also get their hands on the virtualbox and connect to GIT.

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