Tag Archives: SOA

AIA Rides Again?

23 Thursday Jun 2016

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canonicaldatamodel

For those who have been using the Application Integration Architecture on top of Oracle SOA Suite, will probably know that Oracle have sunset AIA as of 12c.  For 12.1 there are Core Extensions to help transition onto the 12c platform but 12.2 leaves these behind.

One of the more valuable parts of AIA for many has been the prebuilt but extensible canonical data model, which are then used by the Prebuilt Integration Packs (PIPs). Having a ready built canonical form can save an enormous amount of effort (consider the amount of effort invested by OASIS and other standards bodies to define standardised data definitions).

So with AIA not moving forward and the canonical form (i.e. XML Schema) no longer being maintained. The question begs how to move forward?  Well given that the model is represented by XML schema you could harvest the schema from an 11g environment, package them up and deploy them in a standalone manner in a 12c environment.  Whilst this will work, it does mean that the data model wont have any future evolution other than by home grown effort.

Depending on your commitment to the AIA model, there is another option to adopt another prebuild form.  I know as result of talking with several other Oracle AIA customers that people are adopting OAGIS.  This isn’t surprising as they have similar characteristics in the way to extend, the way the definitions are defined and structured etc.  Not to mention some common ancestry. However if you have a significant level of utilisation moving to a new model is potentially going to have a significant level of impact.

image008As we have also elected to go the OAGIS route (but fortunately are fairly youthful in our adoption so have elected to switch quickly for all but a couple of objects types. Given this,  I periodically check in with the OAGIS website to come across the following:

Oracle Enterprise Business Objects Contributed to OAGi 
We are very pleased to announce that Oracle has contributed their Enterprise Business Objects (EBOs) and associated IP to OAGi!
The Oracle EBOs are based on OAGIS BODs from a past release and no longer supported by Oracle so they contributed them to us to harmonize with the current version of OAGIS and preserve a technology path for EBO customers.
This also gives OAGi an opportunity to further improve OAGIS content and scope.
I take this as proof of Oracle’s commitment to Open Standards and plan to say so in a press release.  I personally thank Oracle for this commitment.
Scott Nieman of Land O’Lakes will be presenting his Project Definition to begin the process of harmonization on Friday, June 3, at 11 AM EDT at the Next meeting which, as members, you are all invited. Please let me know if you don’t have an invitation and I will forward it to you.
Please join me in thanking Oracle and also please try to engage in our harmonization process to improve OAGIS.

So the basis of this is that OAGIS will gain greater coverage of their domain views. But additionally Scott Nieman will be blazing the way to easing the migration path. I have been fortunate enough to meet and talk with Scott at Oracle Open World and it will be worth keeping an eye out for his findings.

Maintenance & Patching For SOA CS

30 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

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When you’re using SOA Suite to run round the clock services you need to give a fair bit of thought to your deployment configuration so it becomes possible to perform rolling patches and other maintenance tasks not only to SOA itself but all the way down to the hardware – and at the low levels you have no control on the maintenance process.  Although it is very easy to think that the moment you’re using PaaS that these problems are taken care for you, life isn’t as simple as that.

Oracle cloud services typically go through a patching process once a month and usually within a defined 8 hour period on a Friday night. During this period you may lose the use of your servers as the maintenance is performed within a particular availability zone. In an ideal world this would be a rolling process so you don’t lose everything at once. If the maintenance window is used to to deploy SOA Suite patches then although you will be told of the maintenance window you actually wont have an outage, but post the maintenance window your cloud dashboard will have the option to apply the patches at a time that best suits you. Not only that the patch application process is smart enough to apply it in a rolling manner as the Weblogic nodes in the cluster will have information on each other which the patch mechanism can utilise.

So where is the problem.  It is very easy to forget that the PaaS platform is virtual, this means the virtualization platform being software will inevitably need patching whether that is for bug fixing,  addressing security requirements or adding new capabilities. These kinds of changes today will trigger a service shutdown. Let’s be honest when trying to balance a rolling change and maximise PaaS client density is going to create a monumentally complex problem, so simplicity and and speed of roll-out suggests a small outage is easier. So how do I therefore assure I can maintain a quality of service if I accept this as a necessity?


Well the answer is pretty much the same as  an on premise reference architecture.  Have SOA with its supporting databases running in a second availability zone that will have a different patch time. This is going to push up the cost as you’ll need a database with Dataguard. Assuming an active-passive model across your centres, as you approach the maintenance window you’ll get your load balancer to route work load to the second location and let the existing workload run dry on the servers due to go through the maintenance process. Then after the maintenance window you’ll reverse the process.

The current gotchya with this is that you pay for SOA by the month so you in effect have to run two clusters, although hour and daily models are coming.With the hourly model you can have the second availability zone ready for use by keeping the DB alive there, but only startup the SOA instances on the hourly rate when you know the maintenance window is going to occur and it is clear there will be an infrastructure impact.

The other sticky point, is presently as the period allocated is upto eight hours, your second centre needs to be running in a timezone with atleast 8 hours difference (allowing time to fail back). This would mean if you are using the Amsterdam or Slough locations your second location is going to West coast US or Asia Pacific once live later this year or Japan. All of which will present serious issues regarding personal data.

I have been told that some signficiant customers have accepted the situation on the basis the downtime in reality isn’t frequent and correlates to low business periods. But I suspect competition and customer demand will force this to change.

Oracle PaaS – the Good and opportunities to get better

19 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by in General, Java Cloud, Oracle, Technology

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IMG_0180Although Oracle have been late to the cloud party they are certainly making up for it, by bringing products to the cloud at an amazing pace, and using their core products to build out new offerings at a rate that will mean they will at least catch  all the competition across  the breadth of PaaS very quickly.

When it comes to taking on Oracle PaaS  it does have  some quirks, some relate to Oracle’s normal licensing approach, and others I’m told relate to the way US accounting has to work when it comes to realised revenue. A couple of other characteristics I suspect are linked to the fact that the infrastructure for Oracle’s cloud is still being rolled out and grown for capacity.

So firstly the carry over – well outside of a trial account you need to agree and sign a general agreement which provides an overarching legal framework defining terms, conditions and liabilities. This makes dealing with each subsequent purchase a little simpler. Rather than purchasing services as you go, you then purchase credits from Oracle which have a maximum life of 1 year. This does mean you’re not got a pure OPEX spend model – although you do stand a chance of negotiating a better deal as the numbers are naturally bigger. As part of the agreement you’ll get a rate card, so different services cost different amounts – for example a standard edition database will cost x and an enterprise high performance version will cost a bit more. The credits are for specific product families such as SaaS products, products in the PaaS domain for example document cloud, Java cloud, SOA and so on. But make sure the products you might want are in the families you get credits for, there is the odd surprise for example MBaaS isn’t in the same family as the integration products.

In addition your negotiation you need to consider whether  services are in metered or unmetered models.  Unmetered means you agree a level of capacity for the year. This will obviously work out cheaper than a metered model where you can use up your credits as you choose, with different metering rates – for example hourly and monthly. When this was first explained it looked really good for dealing with the situation of having a baseline demand which could be unmetered and then purchasing metered services to capacity burst. Sadly this isn’t possible out of the box. I suspect because of the way Oracle cloud allocates workload to different work domains. So bursting workload would have to be done as if you’re bursting in 2 different clouds. So if you have a dynamic load you either go unmetered to your maximum demand or metered for everything. Either way you’re not getting the best in terms of cost management.  I have to admit I don’t know whether the likes of AWS and Azure when you enter into long term agreements have the same challenges.

One the positive side, with the credits you can then purchase a broad range of configurations of products from just ADB schema all the way a full size  Exadata setup. So performing PoCs is pretty easy and figuring out scaling just means burning your credits quickly and instantiating more capacity.

Before getting into instantiating your cloud instances you’d best  setup access controls to allow people access controls to creating instances. Then you can start creating instances of the products you want. Make sure you protect your credentials as the way things are setup anyone else recovering them will be a problem.

With services such as SOA and Java you do need to go through the process of creating the different layers, storage, then the database and so on. But unlike building on premise each step only requires a couple of clicks and your done. To put it into context the first time I built a small footprint 11g environment took me a couple of days to work my way through on my own create a DB, deploy RCU,Weblogic, SOA and AIA foundation (no load balancing or security etc) and was no way near secure as a cloud instance. Oracle PaaS in three hours we:

  • Meet our Customer Success Manager (more on this shortly)
  • Got the utilities such as putty installed on my laptop
  •  Walked through putty’s key generation quirks and how to avoid the gotchyas
  • being walked through the process, of setting up management rights to our credits and instance creation
  • Instaniated storage, debated on the DB option to use, created the SOA CS instance with OSB, a load balancer and configured SSH security and web access routes to our cloud. Plus setup my developers
  • Had a couple cups of coffee and ordered lunch

With SOA CS and atleast some of the other cloud offerings you also get SSH access to the OS so you can tinker and tune your SOA container and Weblogic etc. Some would argue that totally undermines the ideal of PaaS and that exploiting such a capability means you can end up customising your deployment to the point it will break the moment an update or patch comes along. So it is very double edged. In my mind (but I’m a techie at heart so seeing the engine running is always interesting) it’s good, but must be handled with great care. As they say – with great freedom comes great responsibility.

One of the real wins is that Oracle allocate customers a Cloud Success Manager who are tasked with enabling you to use the Oracle cloud – any problems, guidance needed can be addressed through these people. A cynic might say they exist to help you spend money which becomes released revenue. But our experience is the CSMs are genuinely enthusiastic and helpful  – answering questions at 6pm on a Friday (despite my school boy error).

So in our experience so far I’d suggest Oracle could do two things to really make a big advancement – commercially atleast:

  • Allow payments to be made on a reoccurring model as an alternative to the credits model, perhaps this approach restricts you to metered only services
  • Allow metered and unmetered services to be utilised together – perhaps as a stretched cluster mentality.

This was first made available at https://community.oracle.com/groups/united-kingdom-user-group/blog/2016/03/25/starting-with-oracles-soa-cs 

Oracle Enterprise Manager

23 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Books, General, Oracle, Technology

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Following my recent blog about Single Pane of Glass & OEM I came across an article which illustrates using the OEM packs to monitor Qualogy; article on OEM.  In addition to this article you can get more material about setting up OEM from the YouTube Oracle Learning Library (OLL) here (in addition to the resources on the Oracle OTN site – here).

Packt also have a book on OEM here, which until the end of December 2015 is also available for only $5 (£4).

I’ve been thinking about working on some material to show how you can use OEM to monitor non Oracle resources.

Oracle SOA Cloud

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Oracle, Technology

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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 :

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.

Oracle SOA Components

20 Saturday Jun 2015

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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

Microservices in a COTs and SaaS world

15 Monday Jun 2015

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Moving my recent blogs on Microservices (Microservices & UI, Microservices) forward a bit further as a result of discussing the ins and outs of using the paradigm. Microservices as the very name suggests is the polar opposite of most COTs and particularly ERP solutions which are pretty much modularised monoliths.

It raises the question of can Microservice Architecture (MSA) deliver any benefit in this situation where buy dominates over build. I believe the answer is to an extend yes. Many consider MSA to be SOA++ although I’m not sold on this MSA does exhibit what has been referred to as Service Oriented Integration (SOI) characteristics. That is the key is not the pure service ideas that you would get if you applied the recommendations of Thomas Erl.

The difference between SOI and SOA is that SOI focuses on things like interface contracts and pulling components together (regardless of whether they embody SOA ideals). Where as SOA focuses more on the business process and capability composition. How components are pulled together is an area where MSA has a strong position.

Where SOA and to an extent SOI would need an ESB (or ESB like) platform to perform the business rules and decisioning we should be keeping the intelligence out of the ESB. You will probably still want an ESB or event registration framework so that all services can register to receive events and react as necessary – I.e. Pure pub-sub model.

One of the SOA patterns for dealing with monoliths was to promote the idea of wrapping such services with a SOA abstraction tier so that you can replace the ERP, build out custom capabilities etc.  does this hold true friends a MSA approach. I would suggest yes, but rather than the purity of SOA the abstraction should be aiming for the goals of SOI and simplification both in the ERP interaction, but also moving orchestration intelligence out of an ESB into the services.  You can seen a Genesis of this potential with Oracle’s Cloud Adapters whose base framework aims to simplify the integration.

So what might be he benefit of building the Microservice layer?  We know MSA exchanges code complexity in the service for agility in service delivery. But when there is a monolith behind the services do you gain anything?  The answer is potentially, but will be very dependent on the monolith and ESB. For example if you can actually patch your monolith quickly and easily I.e it doesn’t have  huge dependency chains and deployment capabilities such as Oracle EBZ 12.2 includes improved deployment framework that reduces or removes downtime. Like wise if the middleware is exploiting the best of SCA (as offered by Oracle SOA Suite) and or an OSGi container such as Apache Karaf then the benefits start to become more marginal. It becomes more a devil you know style of debate.

Next Generation SOA book

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

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My copy of the Next Generation SOA on the Service Tech Press /Prentice Hall arrived today. This is first Prentice Hall book I have contributed to as a pre publication reviewer. It is always nice to see a recognition in the book, particularly when the draft of the book is of such a high standing your feedback is more helping finesse things.

Acknowledgements

Next Generation SOA

I have previously blogged that this is a book I would highly recommend, it isn’t a vast heavyweight text, but provides a great broad view of SOA in the current IT landscape.  If you’re not adverse to eBooks you might consider getting the ebook version as the diagrams look far better in colour than in the grayscale of the print edition.

Next Generation SOA

Hierarchy of Data Assurance

19 Sunday Oct 2014

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I was discussing the challenges of ensuring that data is protected and proven to to have integrity and that as the data moves through systems that there isn’t data loss. This sort of thing starts at the simplest level with data validation and with the most advanced and greatest investment you have some end to end reconciliation framework.

Obviously this thinking doesn’t work in every environment, for example complex event processing (CEP) your going to just accept the data coming through and if it’s incomplete or data has been lost along the way you just accept it as it is – these conditions will create outliers which will get smoothed out in trends. It is possible you will have created he gaps by dropping data slow to arrive. But for the majority of your run of the mill solutions such as accounting, HR and so on the thinking stands up.

To communicate the idea effectively to senior management on the risks of just focusing on functional delivery and whether there is maturity in the delivery capability we hit on the idea of using a variant of Maslow’s triangle of needs – something I think everyone gets. You can see our representation here:

hierarchy of Data Assurance

The interesting thing is that you could look at the triangle and suggest that typically the more pressed a project is on factors such as volume of functionality, cost and/or time the more likely a project will remain at the bottom of the triangle. But as the width of the triangle at the point of the capabilities realised also reflects on the operational costs. So if you’re at the bottom of the triangle then you’re likely to incur more costs dealing with data issues as the means to detect and then resolve are a lot more restricted.

With frameworks such as those in Oracle’s SOA Suite and AIA it should make it easier to move up atleast part of the triangle, although full end to end reconciliation is more likely to demand more data centric tools, as you probably want to perform by doing batch like assessments.

Oracle middleware cloud – what does it mean to Mulesoft and Apigee?

10 Friday Oct 2014

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Oracle will soon be launching 2 cloud offerings – a hosted approach to their heavy weight SOA Suite middleware. But more importantly potentially for some of the cloud integration players like Mulesoft and Apigee is a lighter, web interface IDE solution. This lighter solution is clearly aiming (and statements made to the effective of) the Gartner pace layering ethos where you want to quickly link existing services together to offer new capabilities. This new cloud integration service will be aware of all the other cloud service APIs from Oracle you have and provide smart prebuilt transformations, which you can extend or change if you want. For non Oracle integrations the service is meant to use some intelligence and heuristics built through how other customers have realised mappings to make suggestions. With control frameworks for security, access and errors etc based policy mechanisms.

The solution includes access to prebuilt connectors to obviously Oracle products, but also the likes of Salesforce, Workday and more coming like Successfactors. When combined with other new cloud offerings such as their new mobile apps then the pacing message becomes a lot stronger. Add to this the cloud adoption of the CEP (Complex Event Processing) engine (which looks very good) and the addition of several API tools next year for catalog and realtime discovery and they will have a pretty solid suite.

With this lighter weight cloud solution there is meant to be means to pull the integrations out of the cloud and into on-premise middleware deployments. This makes sense as a lot of the capability looks to be built on top of OSB.

Add to all of this the other service offerings being launched such as Dropbox like distributed document with google doc like collaboration and there is a very potent story for the Oracle one stop shop. So you could use Oracle for best of breed integration but convenience and who got fired for buying Oracle is likely to be ruling story.

I suspect you will see Oracle appear strongly in the iPaaS assessments by Gartner soon.

Given Ellison has indicated that the new cloud services from Oracle will be aggressively priced it will be interesting to see how the smaller players differentiate themselves. I suspect one of the keys will be the speed of offering new capabilities by their cloud solutions both at the product core and through connectors. Prior to the 12c launch the rate of change in the middleware space didn’t appear to be rapid.