Best Practice for Implementing Continuous Delivery for Oracle Integration Cloud

Reduce Risk, Decrease Costs and Speed Up Time to Market

Oracle Integration Fast-Tracks Your Business Integrations

Oracle Integration Cloud frees up your organization’s data by allowing integrations to be configured rather than coded, leveraging over 40 pre-packaged connectors for enterprise applications and social media channels. Not to mention, Oracle’s expertise, built up over decades of providing integration solutions, is showcased by accelerating developer productivity by utilising pre-defined integration patterns.

Developers are enabled to think in terms of business operations rather than implementation details. This rapid realisation of key business enablers allows your organization to shift to the needs of a constantly accelerating market.

With Great Power, Comes Great Complexity

A configuration-based approach to developing integrations significantly reduces development time, but sensible governance processes still require a controlled promotion through your organization’s software development life cycle to production. Exporting and importing integrations between OIC environments is a manual process, introducing the possibility of manual error along with a significant time investment.

The manual configuration of connector properties as integrations are promoted through environments invites the possibility of cross-configuration between environments, polluting organizational data.

To mitigate these issues, the testing investment as part of each deployment increases by necessity, increasing resource costs and hampering your organization’s velocity.

These Are Solvable Problems. But Are They Yours?

These are all problems that can be solved, and your organization has smart people who are up to the challenge. But they’re not your core business. They’re orthogonal, enabling core business solutions to be deployed. Solving them is time-intensive and complex, becoming its own project, rife with corner cases and unexpected issues.

As an example, we have complied a table below of the types of challenges that have faced one of our customers and how they can be overcome, efficiently and effectively.

Let Myst bridge the gap, and solve these issues for you. Leveraging our integration expertise and rich history working with Oracle’s product range, Myst provides a zero-scripting-required approach to streamlining your integration deployments. Moving integrations between environments becomes repeatable, consistent, and efficient. In addition, the state of your organization’s integrations in the software development life cycle becomes visible from one centralised dashboard.

Four Steps Forward

By working with a range of customers, we have found 4 common steps customers take to promote their changes through the environments – and we have automated the whole process. The steps are as follows:

Register Cloud Services

Just as OIC can discover components for integrations within your existing environments, Myst utilises a configured connection to an Oracle Cloud identity domain to find available Oracle Cloud services.

Synchronize Cloud Artifacts

Myst connects to an identified cloud service, providing a list of all available artifacts. This discovery step allows developers to select relevant integrations in each cloud service, synchronizing them with Myst.

Developers continue to implement solutions in the chosen source cloud service. Optionally, Myst can be configured to synchronize the code artifact into source control, a mechanism every developer is familiar with and has gone away with the ‘develop in the browser’ methodology.

Assemble Application Blueprints

The work done in OIC can manifest as potentially hundreds of individual integrations, making the process of promoting applications through environments potentially overwhelming from a conceptual perspective. Myst provides several layers of aggregation for integrations, helping shift thinking and planning around deployments back up to a business level.

Myst’s intelligence identifies changes in relevant integrations, and provides the option to automatically synchronise new integrations. As your business needs grow, the number of integrations grows alongside them to fulfill your business needs. Through synchronisation Myst automates the process of deploying new capabilities, providing familiar continuous integration processes for development in the cloud world.

Approve and Promote Application Release Orchestration

Within Myst, application blueprints then become a part of the configuration of a release pipeline, both modelling and enabling the path for integrations from development through to production. Release pipelines allow developers to specify the series of stages integrations are deployed through, leveraging metadata provided as part of configuring connections to cloud services.

Deployments can then be performed manually, or scheduled for automated deployment during ideal release windows to minimise interruption to application services. All required variables for an integration are set once while configuring deployment to a stage, and those values are then used to enable all subsequent deployments. The values set for variables used by connectors can be reviewed at any time, reducing the burden of repeated testing and helping teams regain velocity.

Release pipelines give your OIC deployments reliability and repeatability with zero code or scripting required. They also provide rigor and oversight through the optional configuration of approvals for specific stages, ensuring that the right eyes have looked over changes before they go live. Application blueprints contain their own version history detailing changes over time, so its clear exactly what was deployed at a given point in time.

Myst’s Release Pipelines allow the bulk of pre-deployment work to be done at a time that works for developers, providing greater resource flexibility, and reducing the required time window for complex OIC deployments, helping maximise application uptime and improve service level agreement metrics.

Once Size Doesn’t Fit All

However, sometimes an organization’s requirements need more complex, artisanal solutions. While Myst offers a zero-scripting-required approach for working with OIC, a powerful REST API and Myst’s support for custom actions developed in a variety of technologies allows specific requirements to be accommodated. Supporting extensibility and allowing user-developed solutions remains a core tenet of Myst’s functionality. Further, there could be other use cases where this might be applicable. For example, migrating ICS to OIC or helping manage configuration endpoints across the environments and gaining insight into differences or mis-configuration.

To give Myst a try and start saving up to 75% on deployment times, sign up for free at https://www.mystsoftware.com/sign-up. Or if you would like to talk to one of our representatives about your use cases and see Myst live in action, please let us know at https://www.mystsoftware.com/demo