Training provision for OIC appears to be growing:
- Long time Oracle provider K21 Academy and community member
- UDemy have a page for Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) Courses.
- UnoGeeks
Tag: API
Another month passed already, so here are Feb’s posts.
When ICS was launched it delivered on of the values of PaaS namely you didn’t need to worry about setting up storage, database and compute, it was all sorted out for you. Admittedly it come with a lack of elasticity when it came to resilience and scaling. In contrast Services such as SOA CS which required you to go through each of the layers, but gave you a degree of flexibility. The whilst simpler than building SOA on-premises it still represents a laborious and fiddly process that took time.
When OIC (Oracle Integration Cloud) arrived and the introduction Universal Credits we had a pricing model that made it a lot easier to be elastic in terms of approach to resourcing, but a deployment model that following SOA CS rather than ICS. To an extend, one step forward, and another back.
Fortunately we are seeing head way that means we have recovered that backward step.
The REPL tool was built against ICS running on OCI Classic. As this is no longer available the tool has been withdrawn
Oracle A Team
Earlier in 2017, the Oracle A-Team released a Python library that abstracts the ICS REST API to make some management tasks that you may wish to perform easier. For example, identifying a set of integrations and activating or deactivating them, or simply importing and exporting them. In this Definitive Tip, we will look at the REPL tool and its benefits. The REPL tool can be downloaded here.
Getting setup on Windows at least is a little fiddly as you need to install Python and then depending upon your version of Python update the installer and retrieve a number of additional libraries. REPL itself is available here.
Good development practises such as configuration management and naming conventions have been a topic of conversation a number of times recently for us when it comes to ICS. In this post we will look at what configuration management means to ICS and the application of naming standards.
Why Configuration Management?
So why do we need configuration management with a tool such as ICS? The question depends on what stage of the software lifecycle you are, but a few reasons:
- As a developer there have been occasions where we have tried to optimise something and then decided to reverted back to the last secured state in configuration control.
- Deleted something and then regretted it, whilst desktops have the concept of paper basket to recover from, not so in ICS.
- If your providing packages of ICS functionality you may have different released versions – so need to keep master copies of every version available to refer to.
- Sometimes we get ‘configuration drift’ – and therefore need to have a reference point to compare to. This allows us to determine the drift and if it is appropriate to reset an environment. Whilst this may sound less significant, it is enough of a problem for tools like Puppet to incorporate the ability.
- Tracking what versions of integrations are running in a development vs production environment.