DevOps for Oracle SOA

Over the last 4 years BMA has undertaken a transformation of their logistics supply chain using the Oracle SOA Suite to integrate Business Applications across transportation, logistics, and order management.

An increasing awareness of driving down the cost and reducing the risk of change, BMA embarked with Rubicon Red on a journey to DevOps. Creating a rapid time to release approach to enhancements and minor projects of work. This approach reduces the cycle of change from weeks to days and delivers superior release management processes.

The DevOps approach covers all the basic operations across Automated Provisioning, Continuous Build and Deployment and Release Management.

Automated Provision

To meet their change management demands, BMA has adopted MyST to deliver a Private integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) for Oracle SOA. This allows BMA to have a consistent environment across all qualities of service.

MyST is used to fully automate the provisioning of new environments as well as the ongoing configuration management and patching of existing environments.

Zero Tolerance for Configuration Drift

The initial implementation consisted of modeling the Platform Blueprints, which are used to define a standardized topology and configuration for all environments. Ensuring BMA can provision a consistent middleware platform across all environments and eliminate configuration drift.

Continuous Build & Deployment

The next step was to automate the build and deployment of the over 300 artifacts to each environment. The dependency management, tokenization of environment variables, and flow of tasks was all managed using MyST’s continuous build module.

The deployment process was taking anywhere from 1-2 days for a major release and 2-4 hours for a minor release. This was due to the large number of manual configuration changes that needed to be applied in each environment across the various Oracle SOA Suite components. The move to continuous delivery has reduced this effort to less than 10 minutes.

Release Management

Automating provisioning and implementing continuous build and deployment has reduced the overall effort, cost and risk of change in the BMA SOA Suite environment. Utilizing the hardened Release Management processes of MyST, BMA has increased the level of governance and control over what changes are applied. Enabling BMA to track the impact of these changes and trace each change within a clear version management system.

Result

With MyST, BMA are able to provision a highly complex Oracle SOA Environment at the push of a button. BMA has significantly increased confidence in each release’s production readiness. Consistent with other MyST customers, what was once a resource intensive and highly error prone process has been transformed into one that is automated, predictable and low risk