Organization

Oil and Gas Company

Business

A large oil and gas exploration and development company.

Solution

Upgraded from Oracle SOA 11g to SOA 12c and provisioned a brand new Middleware Platform as a Service across DEV, TEST and PROD environments, to address their hybrid-cloud integration needs.

Oracle Products

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.7

• Oracle WebLogic Server 12.2.1

• Oracle ADF 12.2.1

• Oracle SOA Suite 12.2.1

• Oracle Service Bus 12.2.1

• Oracle Web Services Manager 12.2.1

• Oracle Database Standard Edition version 12.1.0.1

Results

• Automated provisioning of 3 environments, 6 Weblogic domains.

• Provision environments in < 60 minutes - more than 100 times faster than manually.

• Less than a week to implement Dev, Test and Prod.

• Less than 15 minutes to deploy and configure migrated code.

• 50-person days to perform end- to-end upgrade from 11g to 12c vs 170 days manually.

• Zero down time for go-live with side-by-side upgrade.

• Simple DR Solution in place.

• Improved developer productivity ~ 25%.

• ~5-10% reduction in on-going operational costs.

• 95% reduction in errors due to configuration drift.

• 90% reduction in deployment effort.

• 25% reduction in total defects reported during development and testing.

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Focus on Faster Time to Market & Cost Optimization

With a focus on cloud to cost optimize IT operations and increase speed to market, this leading Oil and Gas company is in the process of consolidating and migrating its enterpriseapplications to the cloud. This consists of migrating existing on-premise applications to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, other cloud platforms or replacing them with a growing number of new Saas-based applications. As part of this migration, they wanted to leverage their existing investment in Oracle SOA and establish a modern, cloud-based integration solution on AWS to deliver an enterprise-class, hybrid integration platform to address their current and future integration needs.

As their trusted partner, they looked to Rubicon Red to upgrade their Oracle Middleware environment to Oracle SOA Suite 12c and deliver a Middleware Platform as a Service, running in the cloud on AWS.

Middleware Platform as a Service

MyST was used to deliver a Middleware Platform as a Service (PaaS) running on AWS to quickly and consistently provision highly available Oracle Middleware environments in the cloud. Rubicon Red are also managing the Middleware environment running on AWS, thereby providing an end-to-end Platform as a Service. There are 3 distinct environments for DEV, TEST and PROD. DEV and TEST are implemented as single-node topologies and the PROD environment is implemented as a multi-node topology, to support high availability in the Fusion Middleware software tiers through an active-active mode.

Hybrid Cloud Integration

This organization has implemented a robust, enterprise-class hybrid integration platform using Oracle SOA Suite 12c to integrate ~20+ systems, comprising a mix of SaaS and on-premise systems including Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Service Now, Payroll, eBanking, IT Procurement and a range of bespoke applications developed in Oracle ADF.

Oracle SOA 11g to SOA 12c Upgrade

With dual requirements to minimize PROD downtime as part of the upgrade, and to be able to quickly roll back to the 11gR1 environment in the event of migration issues, ensuring a smooth 12c upgrade was paramount. To this end, they leveraged MyST to provide a simple and automated process for the 12c side-by-side upgrade. They used MyST to introspect the existing 11g environment, and extract the key configuration information and then used this to build an equivalent 12c environment in the cloud.

Automated Platform Provisioning

MyST provides a standardized, repeatable and automated process to consistently provision, configure and manage the Oracle Middleware environments. There are three distinct Oracle Middleware environments (DEV, TEST and PROD), with each environment consisting of an Oracle SOA 12c and Oracle ADF 12c domain, for a total of six WebLogic domains. Using MyST, it took less than a week to design, implement and provision all six domains. A new DEV/TEST environment can be provisioned in less than 60 minutes using MyST. Previously it would take 4-8 weeks to provision a new environment, manually.

Using MyST, they are able to provision environments more than 100 times faster, than using a manual approach. This means they can deliver on-demand development and test environments in the cloud, in alignment with Production environments. The real benefit here is that reliable DEV and TEST environments can be spun up very quickly, eradicating lost time often experienced as teams wait for development infrastructure.

Continuous Delivery

MyST also delivers fully automated Continuous Delivery to streamline build and deployment of code in each stage of the development lifecycle, eliminating human errors and configuration drift inherent in highly resource intensive, manual build processes. Small errors, such as misconfiguration of a middleware component, can cause issues, which are difficult to diagnose and rectify; often requiring many days/ weeks of man effort to resolve. With approximately 80 services in each environment and a requirement to have the capability to deliver new releases weekly (when needed), they wanted to automate the build and deployment process to establish a standardized, repeatable and automated process. The MyST Continuous Deployment module automates the build and deployment of all artifacts, for each release, into all 3 environments. This has slashed release time from 4-8 hours to ~15 minutes.

Cloud-based Disaster Recovery

This organization is using an innovative approach to leverage the cloud to provide full disaster recovery capability in the event of an AWS Availability Zone (AZ) outage. Oracle SOA Suite is leveraging Oracle RDS to provide the database. The production Oracle RDS is a multi-AZ instance, in the event of an outage of AZ1, this would trigger automatic failover to the standby on AZ2. Thereby, incurring no database outage. This innovative approach provides a cost effective, assured Disaster Recovery capability in the cloud.

Results

The ability to deliver the Middleware Platform as a Service means new environments can be spun up very quickly, on demand. This provides the development team with the agility and the efficiency they need to be able to rapidly deliver on new projects as dictated by the business. This provides faster project start up time and improves developer productivity. The end-to-end upgrade process was performed in 50 person-days, transforming what is typically a resource intensive and highly error prone process into one, which was rapid, predictable and low risk. Manually, this effort was estimated to take 170 person-days. What was once a 6-month project was delivered in less than 2 months, achieving ~30% faster go to market. The combination of cloud plus MyST for DevOps will allow them to switch to an agile approach that allows them to continuously deliver new capability into production, further reducing time to market.