On August 22nd, 2019, Dan Goerdt presented a webinar on using continuous integration and continuous delivery for Oracle Integration Cloud and Oracle API Platform. If you missed the live event, it is now available on-demand! You can watch it here.
*WARNING: Spoilers ahead!*
Deploying integrations and APIs from one instance to another is a manual process and requires exporting front one instance and importing into the next instance. Unfortunately, the work doesn’t end there. The associated OIC connections, lookups, and libraries, must be sync’d between instances and the API gateways can be a challenge to manage. This means extra work for you and your team, and can become unmanageable at scale. It also means that you can’t focus on other aspects of your job that you may enjoy more than these mundane manual tasks, not to mention the headaches when things don’t work in one environment but work in another.
These change and deployment processes can be automated!
FlexDeploy’s Oracle Integration Cloud and API Cloud plugins empowers you to:
- Automatically deploy OIC integrations, connections, lookups, and libraries
- Automatically deploy API interfaces
- Automate provisioning and configuration of API gateways
- Optionally integrate with source control tools (i.e. Git, SVN, TFS)
- Optionally adopt Continuous Integration (CI) to trigger build/deploy automatically
- Carry out Smart Deploying, which uses change detection to skip app/page/etc. if already deployed
This means less work for you and more time to concentrate on tasks that you enjoy. It also results in consistent and repeatable processes, more controls and governance, increased visibility and traceability, built-in tests and quality checks, and other benefits of DevOps.
For an in-depth explanation of the above and a demonstration using FlexDeploy, be sure to watch the recording!
Here are the questions and answers from the live event:
Q: Do you also support OIC process applications?
A: Today, out-of-the-box, we do not. There are some things we are considering in that space, but we do not have anything right out-of-the-box that would support that. There are things that we can potentially do with the current product by using other techniques, or we are considering building a plugin. We are also investigating using RPA (robotic process automation) for process applications.
Q: How are deployments with connection information handled when the password changes? Do they have to be redeployed?
A: The passwords are managed in a couple different places. I’m not sure I can connect it specifically to the API platform or Integration Cloud. But in the topology, we store and secure passwords through encryption. We are also have integration with secrets management technology. So, there’s a number of different aspects for how your passwords are managed, but they are externalized and captured as properties associated with either the topology at an environment level, at an instance level, or, in some cases, at a project level. With projects, depending on what and where the project needs to be managed, the password is configured in accordance with that space and changes to passwords are handled in a similar manner for subsequent deployments.
Q: Can specific deploy items be backed out? Or would everything have to be backed out of there was an issue?
A: There’s a number of ways to handle that, so I’ll give you a couple of examples.
Yes, the deployed artifacts are saved in the artifact repository and can be rolled back (redeployed) at a FlexDeploy Project or Release level. (Side note: we have archiving and purging capabilities so you can set up policies for how long you keep the artifacts.) [Specific example demonstrated in recording.]
Q: For API deployments, are all of the request and response pipeline policies supported for deployments.
A: I believe the answer is ‘yes’. We will look into this more and follow up with an email with a specific response.
Q: Can tools other than JIRA be integrated, such as Axosoft?
A: Yes, there’s a couple of different ways to approach integration when we don’t have out-of-the-box capabilities like we have for JIRA and ServiceNow. The integration is usually accomplished via REST API’s or other command line interfaces. We have customers that use change management or other agile project management tools and integrate them with FlexDeploy. So, I think we would have to look at specifically the Axosoft or other tools to provide the specific approach to integration. But in many cases, the answer is ‘yes’. We’ve got full APIs across practically all of FlexDeploy for both administration and execution.
Q: Can you use another vendor API product and the Oracle Integration Cloud.
A: The short answer is ‘yes’. In this case, I used all Oracle products: Oracle Integration Cloud, API, WebLogic, SOA, and OSB. At the end of the day, any project can be part of a release. A fairly common example we see OIC and Oracle API used together, but Google Apigee is an example that we see intermixed. We have customers using OIC and Apigee and that works perfectly fine.
Q: How do you handle configurations that are environment specific?
A: That’s interesting, because I don’t know which properties they are. Let me answer it this way: when I talk about property replacement using the configuration file that you can describe in the project, that is one example of properties that are different across environments. You can externalize that using property/configuration file and it will automatically apply those at runtime. But maybe you’re referring to some of these other items in the topology section?
[More examples given in recording.]
Basically, depending on what type of properties there are, we want to make it easy to be able to apply those that are environment specific. Hopefully that answered your question.
We have two blog series about this: “FlexDeploy Loves OIC” and “FlexDeploy Loves API”. There’s a lot of good detail in those. In the second OIC post, it talks specifically about property replacement, and that might be a good thing to look at if you are interested.
If you missed the live event, the recording is now available!
Be sure to check out our other on-demand and upcoming webinars!
Please contact [email protected] with any questions or concerns.
