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OCTOBER 2018
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Your Monthly PaaS Updates |
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Oracle PaaS Partner Community Newsletter
October 2018
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Table of Contents |
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Announcements & Community Section |
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PaaS Partner Community Reception at Oracle OpenWorld 2018 |
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Oracle OpenWorld 2018 Preview - PaaS Partner Community Webcast – October 11th 2018 |
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PaaS Partner YouTube Update October 2018 |
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Oracle iPaaS market share by revenue grew 270 percent between 2016 and 2017, according to Gartner report |
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Innovate & Integrate and Extend SaaS Bootcamps |
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Oracle Developer Meetups in Utrecht, Brussels, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Cologne and Oslo |
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WEDO industry demos and showcases |
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PaaS free trial accounts ICS, SOA CS, API CS, PCS, IoT and PaaS for SaaS |
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Integration Section |
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API-Key Based Authentication: Quickly and Easily |
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Enabling the Future Today - Feature Flags in Oracle Integration Cloud |
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PeopleSoft Integration using Oracle Integration Cloud – Part 1 |
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PeopleSoft Integration using Oracle Integration Cloud – Part 2 |
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Advanced HCM data loader (HDL) processing using OIC HCM adapter |
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How to use Litmus to create OIC Integration unit tests automatically and run them to catch regressions |
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Using a Library in OIC |
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How to enable and use Tracing in less than 5 min |
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Overriding Schedule Parameters |
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CRUD Operation in Oracle Integration Cloud (Part-1) |
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Stripping off the ECID Header using Oracle Traffic Director |
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Business Process Management Section |
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What is the value and use cases of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the Process Automation space? |
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Migration from Oracle BPM to Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud — Streamlining Process Automation in the Cloud |
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Architecture & User Experience & Innovation Section |
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Breaking down AI-infused Oracle Autonomous Cloud services |
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How Blockchain Could Transform Telecommunications |
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Additional new material PaaS Community |
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Top tweets PaaS Partner Community – October 2018 |
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Training Calendar PaaS Partner Community |
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My private Corner - when leadership changes |
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Announcements & Community Section |
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You are invited to join our traditional PaaS Partner Community Reception at OpenWorld. The Reception will be held on Monday October 22nd 2018 in San Francisco! Don't miss this unique opportunity to:
- Network and exchange information with fellow Oracle Middleware & PaaS Partners
- Meet with members of the Global Oracle Middleware & PaaS Product Management team and Oracle EMEA Alliances and Solutions Partner Programs team
- Learn more about Oracle OpenWorld activities
Schedule: Monday October 22nd 2018 18:30 (California time)
For details please visit the registration page here.
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Attend our October edition of the PaaS Partner Community Webcast live on October 11th 2018 at 17:30 CET.
At Oracle OpenWorld you will be surrounded by the new, the cutting-edge, and the sometime unfamiliar. From today’s most-trusted products to tomorrow’s technologies, you will leave infused with inspiration, new ideas and relationships. Whether you attend for a day or four, you’ll engage in free-flowing ideas that will help you and your business achieve tomorrow’s business goals, today!
With a portfolio of keynotes, product demos, collective learning sessions, and so much more, you won’t want to miss out on today’s premiere business and technology event. We will update you on the key announcements and OOW activities 2018.
Presenter:
Ed Zou
Vice President Product Management
Visit the registration page here.
Call ID: 5566478 and Passcode: 259195
UK: +44 (0) 208 118 1001 &
United States: 140 877 440 73
More Local Numbers |
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Schedule:
Thursday October 11th 17:30 - 18:30 CET
Visit the registration page here.
Missed our PaaS Partner Community Webcast? – watch the on-demand versions:
For the latest information please visit Community Updates Wiki page (SOA Community membership required).
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 Oracle today announced that it has achieved the highest market share by revenue in Gartner's "Market Share Analysis: Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide, 2017" report1. This report follows Oracle being named a Leader in Gartner's 2018 "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service" report2 in April.
"We believe our market share demonstrates the value Oracle Cloud Platform delivers to thousands of enterprises every day," said Amit Zavery, executive vice president of development, Oracle Cloud Platform. "Our comprehensive iPaaS offering has eliminated the barriers between various Oracle and third-party ERP, HCM, and CX applications to provide a seamlessly connected business spanning cloud and on-premises. This comprehensive and easy-to-use offering, combined with strong synergy with the rest of the Oracle Cloud portfolio, continues to help our customers successfully transform and evolve their businesses by leveraging modern integration technologies, including artificial-intelligence and machine learning-powered services."
"GE leverages Oracle Integration Cloud to streamline commercial, fulfilment, operations and financial processes of our Digital unit across multiple systems and tools, while providing a seamless experience for our employees and customers," said Kamil Litman, vice president of software engineering, GE Digital. "Our investment with Oracle has enabled us to significantly reduce time to market for new projects, and we are excited about Oracle's autonomous cloud capabilities." Read the complete article here.
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Want to learn more about developing Enterprise-grade Cloud Native applications on the Oracle Cloud Platform, covering topics like Microservices Architecture, developing in Node, Python and PHP, using Low Code development tools to build Mobile apps, and much more? Join the Oracle Developer Meetup groups if you want to follow Oracle’s solutions in this area, or participate in the events and hands-on labs we organize:
Please let us know in case you want to run an event at one of this location or you want to start your local meetup. We are looking forward to support you and sponsor the event with pizza and beer!
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The Oracle WEDO team in Spain developed industry demos and showcases:
You want to use them for your customer meetings? Please feel free to get in contact with the team via twitter.
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API-Key based authentication is a simple way for providing secure access to APIs. This involves the following steps:
- Pre-requisite: User logs in to the service portal and finds or generates an API-Key.
- The API-Key is shared with the client application.
- The client application makes a request for a resource using the API key.
Steps required in API Key based authentication.
* An API-key is simply a token that a client provides when making API calls.
How to invoke a REST API protected with an API-Key using Oracle Integration Cloud?
Oracle REST Adapter provides a comprehensive way for consuming external RESTful APIs. It provides a re-usable connection that can be used to specify the security policy for accessing protected APIs. For consuming APIs protected using an API-Key, integration developers should proceed by selecting API Key Based Authentication security policy. Read the complete article here. Read the complete article here.
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Enabling the Future Today
Within Integration cloud we are moving to a model that allows us to trial new features without making them available to everyone. Everone runs the same codebase but feature flags control what is available to a specific instance. Why would we do this? For multiple reasons:
- Gain feedback on new features before rolling them out to the whole user base.
- Test new features in "the wild" in a controlled manner.
- Be able to rollback new features that may have unforeseen problems.
How It Works
Each new feature is given a flag that is used to control its availability. For instance the flag for the small footprint OIC agent was oic.adapters.connectivity-agent.light-weight-agent. If this flag was enabled for a given OIC instance then they could download the lightweight connectivity agent. Other OIC instances running the same code but with the flag turned off would not offer the new agent.
Flags are controlled from a central system and can be updated in real time by Oracle development and operations. This means that feature flags can be turned on very quickly, and also if a problem occurs they can be disabled.
Feature Flag Lifecycle
Feature flags have a lifecycle as illustrated below.
The different stages are:
Internal Only
You may see a product manager demo features on an instance that are not currently available, if using a production pod these may only be available to internal users. This is where we try things out internally before turning them on for any customers. Once we are happy with the feature internally we are ready to share it with selected customers and move the feature to Feature Controlled. Note that this change in stage does not require any code changes, it just alters our internal approval process to enable the feature. Read the complete article here.
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Luckily, I’ve got a chance to look at PeopleSoft integration with other SaaS app using OIC (Oracle Integration Cloud) and decided to share what I learned.
If you’re not familiar with PeopleSoft, please visit PeopleSoft Information Portal and just click hamburger menu on top right-hand side of web page. You will see it covers lots of things.
I’ll explain contact information synchronisation from Salesforce.com into PeopleSoft which is SOAP web service based integration. It is a typical integration use case for PeopleSoft. Will post REST API and file based integration in future as well.
PeopleSoft has excellent middleware layer called Integration Broker. And I’ve chosen SOAP web service for contact information component interface as it would be easiest and simplest way to expose simple business logic in PeopleSoft as SOAP web service. Of course, you have other options such as REST API, JMS, file based integration, it really depends on organisation’s integration requirements. Read the complete article here.
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Now we’re ready to create connections and integration from OIC. If you missed part 1, please go for Part 1 now. Also my colleague Carlos already wrote excellent blog, Teaching how to integrate Salesforce and Sale Cloud with Oracle Integration Cloud Service so you can look at how to configure outbound message from Salesforce.com and Salesforce Connection with Trigger from OIC.
We know OIC is capable of hybrid integration so you actually can use OIC for SaaS integration scenarios such as SaaS and SaaS or SaaS and on-premises. You may need to set up VPN between your data centre and OIC using VPNaaS (VPN as a Service from Oracle) or just install OIC connectivity agent inside your organisation network. It’s really depending on the network / security policy of your organisation.
For PeopleSoft, it’s normally located behind corporate firewall so make sure you’ve got VPN is working or connectivity agent installed. So make sure that you’ve got successful web service call from public internet using the SOAP / REAT API test client such as Soap UI / Postman. That would save lots of your time to debug connectivity issue later. Don’t forget to enable web service request logging as well. PeopleSoft provides excellent internal tools to monitor web service request which I will explain next section.
Enable request message logging from PeopleSoft
Visit again to NavBar from top right-hand side from PeopleSoft, then go to Navigator, PeopleTools, Integration Broker, Integration Setup, Services. Now search by service name CI_CONTACT_INFO. After that, select operation CI_CONTACT_INFO_F.V1. Finally select Routings tab and set *Log detail to Header and Detail as below. This will enable web service request message logging which helps you to debug. Read the complete article here.
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Introduction
Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) Integration provides adapter for most popular SaaS applications, including Oracle HCM Cloud. This post focuses on integrating with HCM data loader (HDL) tool of HCM using OIC HCM adapter, multiple HDL file processing and fault handling. Information in this post is applicable to release 18.3.1 of OIC.
HCM Adapter basics
Refer to documentation here, for more information about HCM adapter. At a high level, HCM adapter makes it easier to integrate with HCM cloud using REST , HDL. HCM Extracts and ATOM feeds. As with all OIC adapters,a connection is first created using Oracle HCM Cloud adapter with endpoints and credentials to the target HCM cloud environment. This connection is then used as invocation target in integration flows, at which time the specifics of the integration such as HDL or ATOM feeds is configured. Note that HCM adapter does not generate HDL-formatted file at this time, although this can be done using OIC. Refer to another A-team blog for guidance on generating HDL files within an integration flow. Below are the sample configuration screens for using HCM adapter for HDL imports.
Integration logic and Implementation
The integration flow elaborated here was demonstrated to a customer who had the following requirements:
- Multiple HDL files from several source systems should be processed for each run, from FTP location
- Files should be processed in alpha numeric order of file name.
Read the complete article here.
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In this blog, I'd like to show you how easy it is to use Oracle Litmus, a new feature added to Oracle Integration Cloud for creating unit tests automatically with a few clicks and run those tests to catch regressions. Litmus supports the following use cases:
- Enable Integration Cloud users to create unit tests automatically and play them back to catch regressions when they modify their integrations (typically when they enhance an already created integration before making it production).
- Enable Integration Cloud QA to catch product regressions as part of a new release of Integration Cloud.
- Send Oracle a recorded instance so that Oracle can play back the instance to reproduce an issue or a bug. This is difficult without Litmus because all the dependent endpoints and third party adapters might not be available in-house to reproduce the issue. With Litmus, the endpoints are simulated and hence not needed to reproduce the issue.
Enabling Litmus
Let's assume that you have built an integration which runs as per your requirements and you have completed all your manual testing. Now you are ready to go production. At this point, you might want to create a Litmus Test and want to check that into your source repository. This is so that when you want to change that integration later, you can rely on the Litmus test to catch regressions. Regression in this case is an assertion failing because the response you're sending to the client has changed due to a bug that was introduced in a mapping as an example.
Enable the Litmus with below steps:
- A feature flag has to be enabled in OIC to enable Oracle Litmus. To turn on the feature flag, open a Service Request with Oracle support.
- Once the feature flag is enabled, login as a developer.
- From the list of integrations displayed in the integrations page, click the inline menu for the integration and click Oracle Litmus -> Enable Litmus Recording
- You can also enable Litmus as part of the Activation as well.
Read the complete article here.
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Introduction
A library is a file or a collection of multiple files bundled in a JAR that contain Javascript functions. Library is used within an integration and is executed by a Javascript engine on the server as part of an integration flow.
This document describes the following:
- Requirements that a Javascript function needs to meet to be used within integration.
- How to create Javascript file or collection of Javascript files that are suitable to be used in creating a Library.
- Javascript function requirements
Following are the requirements based on which Javascript function should be written so that it can be registered and works correctly in OIC.
- 1.1 Function return values should be named
Consider this example
function add ( param1, param2 ) {
return param1 + param2;
}
Even though the above example is a perfectly valid Javascript function it can't be registered as a library in OIC because without a named return value the library metadata editor is unable to identify parameters returned by this function so that it could be used in mapper for mapping downstream activities in an integration.
OIC requires you to change the above function and name the return parameter like this example. Read the complete article here.
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In this short blog, I'd like to show you how easy it is to enable tracing in OIC Integration and start tracing your integration flows. When Tracing is enabled, OIC Integration prints detailed info before and after each action that is executed (optionally the payload if needed). Hence care should be taken to make sure that it is enabled only for debugging purposes and turned off before going production.
Global Tracing
Let's assume that you have a requirement where you would like to enable or disable tracing for every integration you have created. You can use the global tracing for accomplishing the same. Enable the Global tracing with below steps:
- Login as an administrator.
- Click Settings on the left side.
- Click Trace on the left side.
- Select Global Tracing On and Click Save on the top right.
- Optionally you can select Include Payload which will additionally write the payload.
Integration Level Tracing
If your requirement is to enable the tracing for one or more integrations and disable tracing for the rest of the integrations, you can use Integration Level tracing. Enable the Integration tracing with below steps:
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A quick recap on schedule parameters
Schedule Parameter feature supports adding scalar variables for Scheduled Orchestration Integrations. These parameter values are available across scheduled runs for the particular Integration and can be overridden by downstream actions like Assign. A maximum of five schedule parameters can be defined per Integration.
Requirements like the following can be achieved by using schedule parameters:
1. Maintaining the Last Run Time (position) of the scheduled integration to avoid duplicate processing of data.
2. Process information for specific directory/area/region.
As mentioned above, schedule parameters can be updated in the orchestration by using Assign.
Please refer Oracle Documentation for more details about this feature.
How to override schedule parameters
Today if user wants to invoke a Scheduled Integration (containing schedule parameters) with different parameter values, they need to deactivate the Integration, configure a new default value and activate it back.
Schedule parameter override feature enables user to provide parameter values while invoking the Integration without deactivating it. This feature is controlled by feature flag oic.ics.console.schedule.parameter-override-support.
Once the feature is enabled, a popup will be displayed when user clicks Submit Now or Start Schedule - for Integrations that have schedule parameters defined. Users can view the Default and Current Value of parameters and, if required, input a New Value to override the Current/ Default values. Read the complete article here.
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This is the first part of DB CRUD operation in Oracle Integration Cloud(OIC).
Use Case: Create a REST service which will insert the users in the Oracle database table. Follow the article for the pre-requisite. Let's get started and implement the use case:
- Login in the Oracle Integration Cloud and navigate to the Integration tab
- Click on Create button and select App Driven Orchestration template
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My long-time followers will know that I like Oracle Traffic Director (OTD) a lot (and its Sun iPlanet heritage): it is a fast, stable and mature software load balancer.
OTD is available on Exalogic, with WebLogic Multi-Tenant, and more commonly now as a component of Oracle Java Cloud Service or SOA Suite Cloud Service.
Recently I was asked if OTD could strip the ECID HTTP header off inbound requests to SOA. Whilst I knew I could manipulate or remove headers, I hadn’t done that with ECID before… and it turns out that is not quite so straight-forward and there’s no documentation about it. Therefore last weekend I burnt quite a few midnight hours on this, along with one the Oracle Support OTD engineers in California, and we came up with a solution. Unfortunately, for non-technical reasons, this solution hasn’t gone into production but I’m confident it could, so thought I’d describe it here in case anyone else has the same requirment (I also suggested on the SR that a MOS note is written about it).
What is an ECID?
Firstly, let’s recap what an Execution Context Identifier (ECID) is. This is a unique ID, attached as the ECID-Context HTTP header, that is propagated through the various layers of an application stack to allow you to track and correlate requests. For example, if you are using SOA you can us Enterprise Manager (EM) Fusion Middleware Control (FMWC) to track all the steps and calls to other systems that a composite might make.
Typically a Fusion Middleware components will add a new ECID if one is not there, or pass it through, with or without manipulation if it is. OTD is a case in point – by default every request sent to an origin server will have an ECID, and if there wasn’t one on the inbound request OTD will generate one… this also alludes to the fact that the ECID-Context header is “special” for OTD.
What was the requirement?
This particular case involved an on-prem Oracle SOA platform calling our SOA CS platform repeatedly (1000s of times) as the source system processed a bulk feed. Transactions weren’t involved so every call to our SOA platform was essentially independent but, because the call already had an ECID corresponding to the instance on the source, this meant we had lots of instances with the same ECID, which in turn made EM FMWC unusable. So I was asked to remove the ECID, in that way either OTD or SOA (it didn’t matter which) would give each call a new, unique one. Read the complete article here.
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During the last two decades, much of the Process Automation efforts concentrated on using Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) as a means to document and digitize business processes. This technology wave helped the Process Automation space make a significant step forward. BPMS tools armed with Integration capabilities allowed organizations (and their business and IT stakeholders) visualize the processes they wanted to automate. From this initial business process documentation phase, it was possible to create a manageable digital asset to help “orchestrate” all business process steps regardless of its nature (people and systems). Without risking to exaggerate, most of Process Automation (or Business Process Management) practitioners would agree, that one of the hardest implementation areas is integrating with systems of information that the business process needs to transact with. BPMS vendors offered a wide array of application integration capabilities, usually in the form of application adapters, to integrate with these Enterprise and Productivity Applications. As more systems needed to be integrated from the business process, the hardest the implementation phase became. As much as we would like for Applications to enable all transactions via publicly available APIs, this is not the case and limits what integration service capabilities can do to integrate in an automated and headless manner.
Simplification in the Integration space helps!
New Enterprise and Productivity Applications have started to really invest early in Application Programming Interfaces (API). REST based Web Services as an implementation mechanism and an API-First approach to offer Application functionality, certainly offered a simpler consumption of Application functionality and by transition it simplified the Process Automation implementation projects “hardest” last mile: integration. Integration vendors can leverage these APIs and offer a direct and easy way to transact against these Applications.
But is this not well enough?
Well… if your business processes create logic around new SaaS Applications you may be lucky. But for many organizations (and specially those that have gone the path of merger and acquisitions) it is not. Whether we like it or not, there are still many systems that are very hard to transact or interact with. This category of Applications include mainframe systems and homegrown to Enterprise Applications. But also, any kind of application that has gone some kind of customization where this functionality is only available through the application user interface (UI). Read the complete article here.
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In my last blog post Migrating your Oracle BPM assets into Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS), I have described and demonstrated how to migrate modeling assets (essentially BPMN models) by leveraging the conversion framework that you can find at my repository at GitHub.
As stated on the blog post above, the major use case was to demonstrate how customers using Oracle BPM Composer for modeling purposes *ONLY* could streamline their migration process from Oracle BPM into PCS. Also, as declared earlier, I have seen many customers that are using BPM for documentation purposes only, but at the other end, and as you might be likely asking yourself, there are many others that have already developed many projects and processes on top of the Oracle BPM not only for documentation purposes, but indeed for process automation, and obviously want to move them to the respective cloud version of Oracle BPM (aka PCS), given all the very known benefits of cloud adoption such as lower costs, greater agility, improved responsiveness and better resource utilization among other technical and business drivers.
Thus, with Process Automation in mind, asset migration from Oracle BPM to PCS becomes an even more serious matter, but the good news is that this is really possible. Read the complete article here.
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Architecture & User Experience & Innovation |
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Oracle offers a variety of AI-infused cloud services that it says will automate common administrative and operational tasks for users. Here's a look at what's available now.
Oracle has enhanced a number of its cloud services with machine learning and AI to automate key operational tasks. Although these new Oracle Autonomous Cloud services vary widely, they all offer automation features that Oracle describes as self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing.
The self-driving features automate administrative operations, including provisioning, security, monitoring, backup, recovery and troubleshooting. With these features, Oracle Autonomous Cloud can also automatically increase or decrease compute or storage resources without incurring downtime. Read the complete article here.
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Telecommunications might not be the first area you think of when it comes to blockchain. But the technology could play a significant role, particularly in roaming—the handoff of a call or a data session from one network provider to another, which generates a lot of data. Blockchain could validate the accuracy of the files being transitioned through the system, curbing redundant work and adding a bit more trust to the existing process.
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Additional new content PaaS Partner Community |
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Thomas Kurian build successful the Middleware business at Oracle. From an application server, developer tools, portal, reporting tools, identity management and integration technologies to a complete middleware stack. WebLogic Suite and SOA Suite are the flagship products. With the transition to the cloud this workloads can be shifted. Java Cloud Service and SOA Cloud Service are Oracle’s fist successful PaaS solutions. The new generation of Oracle’s Cloud Services like Oracle Integration Cloud and Application Container and Container Cloud Service accelerate growth and customer success. The latest innovations like machine learning and Blockchain or Chatbots support our customers in their digital transformation. Changes in leadership drive new ideas and raise new opportunities, will be an exciting Oracle OpenWorld 2018. We will miss Thomas Kurian and will one day meet again THANKS!
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