Deploying to the SOA Cloud Service

Overview

On Monday night we obtained access to the SOA Cloud Service here at Flexagon, where we hope to use it for on-demand capacity.  One of our goals with FlexDeploy is to make it easy to move components from one environment or instance to another, enabling a true “lift-and-shift” into the cloud.  Since the SOA Cloud Service is built on top of the same underlying Oracle infrastructure, configuring it as a FlexDeploy target is a breeze.

In this blog article, I will cover how to deploy a set of projects that are currently used on-premise into this new SOA Cloud Service.

Adding a SOA Cloud instance to FlexDeploy

To deploy our composites we had a few steps to complete:

• Added the required datasource and outbound connection pool entries
• Created the SOA partition we deploy to (“order”)
• Created customization and configuration plans for the new environment
• Added the new endpoint and instance to FlexDeploy
• Deployed the composites and OSB components into the SOA Cloud Service instance

The screen below is the configuration screen for the SOA Cloud instance in FlexDeploy. This one configuration page handles the instance specific configuration.  

Click image to enlarge.

As an interesting note, the instance of FlexDeploy above is running on the Java Cloud Service.

Executing the Deploy

I have a FlexDeploy application that contains 5 projects I plan to deploy:

• PackAndShipService (SOA Composite)
• ProcessOrder (SOA Composite)
• SBOrderEBS (OSB Project)
• SBOrderTransferApplication (OSB Project)
• ValidatePayment (SOA Composite)

Below, we see the successful deployment of the 5 projects in FlexDeploy.

Evidence of Success!!

The SOA Cloud Service has the same tools we use on-premise(em and sbconsole as an example). Below is the SOA Cloud’s EM console showing both the Service Bus projects and SOA Composites deployed.

The Service Bus Console also shows our 2 Service Bus projects.

Everything is ready for testing!

Summary

In all, adding SOA Cloud instances to your infrastructure in dev/test environments for specific projects can be a great way to flex capacity. You can start and stop the instance based on your needs and only pay for it when you need it. Oracle does all the heavy lifting of base provisioning and management for the environment. We just need to deploy and run!

Reference

Oracle blog on SOA Cloud Service availability:

https://blogs.oracle.com/integration/entry/soa_cloud_service_is_available