Understanding Integration Cloud and how to get the most out of your implementation

Tag: cloud service

ICS to OIC

We have had a number of interesting conversations of late about the transition from ICS to OIC and to spice the discussion whether it should be OIC or Autonomous OIC. The reality of the situation is that the transition between ICS and OIC is a relatively straight forward one using the export and import tooling.

The real challenge is the impact to organisations appears to be the change in licensing models as OIC works with the newer Universal Credit Model (UCM) where as ICS is in the older arrangement of traditional accounts where you buy the use of specific services, in some ways not too different from traditional Oracle traditional product licensing. For organisations that operate with corporate level buying teams this is organisationally more challenging. As just buying credits can feel like your giving the IT children pocket money and you don’t trust them to ensure the money is spent wisely and they don’t come running back a day later when they say spent all the money can we have some more.

IOC or Autonomous OIC

For the smaller customers where they’re generating less than 5000 Messages per hour (think Integration triggers where each message is <50k – which is fairly big for most needs. Although be aware but moving large files is going to eat through your messages as the transfer cost is file size / 50k = no. messages used (consumed or sent), of effectively 250MB per hour. The autonomous option is a no brainer for smaller use cases in terms of cost as it means on current pricing you have your integrations operating for a lot less than £500 per month (£0.5867 x 24 x 30 – using standard with the flex schemehttps://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/OIC/pricing). With that the SaaS adaptors are also included – that means you could operate say Workday to Oracle Financials for an SME without much problem.

Note: Presently June 2018 Edition of Oracle PaaS and IaaS Universal Credits Service Descriptions - does not clearly define KB and mixes KB and Kb. Having raised this with product management it has been confirmed to mean KiloBytes and NOT Kilobits

As the volumes increase, the differences are going to change, whilst we haven’t done the maths, we’d expect the increasing volumes to eventually favour traditional OIC.

The rules do go beyond simple messages when the Visual Builder (VBCS) and Process (PCS) elements gets involved. The formulas do boil down to users and message counts so the maths are relatively managable. Note the explination for concurrent users is a little more complex than may first appear, and worthy of a blog explination in its own right.

There are other considerations as well for Autonomous OIC vs standard OIC, such as whether you want to have more or less control on the processes such as absorbing updates, handling backups, whether you need to isolate the data from everyone else – and this is a question that is likely to be driven by compliance over anything else for most. Whilst we’ve just highlighted the list prices, when doing the calculations of the cost benefit, you need to factor in the skill sets involved in the different options and the ability to respond to dynamic demand.

Just to link it back to the book, whether its OIC or Autonomous OIC the integration engeine is essentially still the same as ICS. So reading about ICS is still going to help, of course there will be some cosmetic differences, but the fundamentals remain the same.

Selecting which iPaaS Product(s) to use – ICS Definitive Tip #4

In the last few years Oracle’s iPaaS offerings have progressed significantly from one or two solutions such as Mobile Cloud Service to in excess of 35 offerings. This makes it challenging to decide which product(s) to use. The means for selection depends upon a range of factors including:

  • Most suitable licensing model (ICS provides a lower cost of entry than SOA CS as you’re paying by message volumes)
  • Development skills and desire to resilience or invest in people (SOA on-premises to SOA CS is easier than a technology change such as ICS)
  • The amount of control you have in an environment – JCS offers more control than ACCS for example

Oracle Messaging Cloud Service (OMCS) on Trial

This post provides a fairly detailed introduction to registering and creating a trial instance of Oracle Messaging Cloud Service. We have written this as in our book Introducing Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) we use Oracle Messaging Cloud  Service(OMCS) in chapter 8 to illustrate message based integration outside  of ICS. Whist we describe the process for OMCS, the mechanics are similar for a number of the iPaaS offerings from Oracle including ICS, PCS but not SOA CS as this is a far more complex product and the fee charging structure is rather different.

In the screenshots of the process that follows, we have blurred out key credentials, this is purely for personal security reasons.

The first step is to create the trial of OMCS, to do this you need an Oracle account. This can be done from the main Oracle site. If you already have an account with Oracle Technology Network (OTN) or Oracle community then you are already sorted as Oracle operates a single sign on.

Public FTP Services that could be used with Chapter 9

In chapter 9 of the book we work through a number of examples of using ICS with FTP.  If you don’t have a web provider that already offers you an FTP server to use you, we’ve found a few services you might consider using. We provide no guarantees for their trustworthiness and reliability. But they maybe sufficient to enable to run the scenarios described in the book:

The alternate option is to exploit the fact that website hosting compaies usually provide FTP access to upload content. Here are a couple of options:

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