This blog post was written by Johannes Michler (Chief Technology Officer (CTO) @ Broadpin & Oracle Ace Director). It was originally published on 13 October 2020 by PROMATIS, which is now Broadpin.
Recently we have seen a lot of our customers implementing Oracle SOA Suite on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - some upgrading from earlier releases of the SOA Suite, others doing a new implementation of an integration platform based on SOA Suite. This blog will have a look at typical customer situations and how we brought them onto a new SOA integration platform on OCI from a high level perspective.
There is also a recent Oracle Video describing SOA on OCI.
The situation we saw with this customer was as follows:
The customer had previously implemented hundreds of 1:1 integrations between their On Premise (in various, globally distributed data centers) and Cloud Applications and was searching for an integration platform around an Enterprise Service Bus. The basic idea is to define Canonical Business Objects that can then be exchanged between the different systems more easily than connecting everything individually.
The customer had neither Oracle Database licenses (for the SOA Suite Metadata repository) nor Oracle SOA Suite licenses. Using Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) was not (yet) an option, mainly due to complex Event Hub patterns.
Given the above prerequisites, the customer had three options to license Oracle SOA Suite:
Buy new "On Premise" licenses for Database (SE or EE), Weblogic Suite Plus and SOA Suite for all OCPUs used for SOA Suit dev, test an prod.
Subscribe to SOACS
In consultation with the Oracle SOA Suite product management (many thanks to their great help during this evaluation and the subsequent project), the customer decided to subscribe to the SOA Suite on OCI Marketplace. Although this was very early after Oracle published the images, we faced no major issues and this approach was:
much cheaper than buying On Premise SOA and Database licenses to run them in an On Premise or Cloud Data center and
brought us a more up to date and longer supported version (12.2.1.4) than we would have gotten with SOACS
The situation for this customer was different from the previous one:
The Customer has been using SOA Suite for 10+ years to implement all integrations around their central ERP System "Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3". They were initially 10g customers who had upgraded to 12.1.3 and then last year to 12.2.1.3. Their hardware and operating system (SUSE Linux 11) were both running out of support. SOA Suite Release 12.1.3 itself will soon also run out of support. The customer runs their E-Business Dev- and Test Environments on OCI and plans to move EBS PROD as well.
Given the above, the customer had evaluated the following options in more detail:
Buy new "On Premise" hardware and do a new 12.2.1.4 installation of SOA Suite there
Do a "custom" installation of both SOA Suite 12.2.1.4 and a Database 19c for the Metadata Repository on OCI
Use the SOA Suite on OCI marketplace image in the Bring Your Own License (BYOL) fashion: https://cloudmarketplace.oracle.com/marketplace/en_US/listing/74792101
Together with the customer, we finally decided to do a "custom" installation of SOA Suite on OCI. Basically the reasons were:
With the marketplace images it is not possible to use a custom installed Oracle Database as the metadata repository. However, using DBaaS for OCI also in the BYOL model is significantly more expensive than using just OCI Compute (and e.g. the 19.7 database marketplace image)
On Premises, we had two SOA environments installed on a single machine due to a limited number of SOA Suite licenses. This gave us more flexibility/performance than having two separate machines. This setup is not (yet) supported by the marketplace image
The marketplace image has a lot of pre-configured setup (e.g. B2B) that did not fit our needs / previous setup
For both customers running SOA Suite on OCI, it helped them to create state-of-the-art integration architectures using SOA Suite on OCI. So far, all instances have performed in a very stable manner at considerably lower costs than if the customers had run Oracle SOA Suite in an On Premises data center.
