Everyone is aware of the continuous integration and continuous development relevance which is nowadays the mantra of DevOps practices.
Oracle Integration is obviously part of the end2end lifecycle development being involved for connecting legacy applications usually deployed on-premise and SaaS applications often provided by Oracle Cloud or hosted on other Cloud providers.
It doesn’t matter where the applications are, where the integration is; the continuous delivery of new integration processes and versions need to be included in a smart and automated tool able to reduce the gap between the different developer teams.
Developers, who have the ownership to build new services and IT Operators, who have the task of deploying new code versions to the different environments, need to converge on one single tool to simplify complex procedures that can be simply considered as two sides of the same coin.
The common need is to keep all environments aligned with the latest implementations, possibly having everything monitored and tracked to grant audit activities in terms of compliance; this is a must when the project is starting to become critical and relevant at the enterprise level.
Oracle Integration (OIC), as you know, includes Visual Builder Cloud Service which allows open-source standards-based integration to develop, collaborate on, and deploy applications within Oracle Cloud.
Just for this, it’s easy to use Visual Builder Studio, the built-in tool, that allows developers to manage the software life cycle automating the development.
Oracle VB Studio natively supports Oracle Integration artifacts, so we can leverage this one to easily promote our integration flows from an environment to another one moving for example our integration projects from development to test environment once you we completed the new implementation and of course ready to test it.
That’s the right path to be used for promoting projects from Test to Production or from Production to a DR environment, this one probably running on a different OCI Region.
Working with the current implementation you can:
- Export integration flows
- Import integration flows
- Delete integration flows
As shown below in the picture, the options we have working with Oracle Visual Builder Studio and OIC
Herewith an example of pipeline that you can easily configure to automate the Export / Import procedure and defining in cascade all steps (“jobs”) to define the required actions, of course this one below just for demo purposes. This procedure will be later explained step-by-step just in case you want to reproduce this one for your own purposes
In order to export our assets from the development environment, for example, it’s enough to configure our source and target environments about the OIC instances
How to configure our OIC environments?
This is a straightforward operation working with VB Studio, as shown below:
We can create all connections we need to configure properly the tool
Once we have configured our instances, we need to build our “pipeline” so to automate the procedure when needed
Each pipeline can include all “jobs” we need (in the previous screenshot we have used two different jobs “select your OIC project” and “import OIC project”) so to build the right chain among the different available “jobs”
To create a job, select the Build link from the left panel of the Visual Builder studio and then we can create a new job
Each job has some options and parameters to be configured as below the screenshot shows:
Select the “Parameters” tab to configure the string parameter:
The “Default Value” is the value of the integration flow version on our OIC instance to be selected and moved to the new instance. Of course, this value can be changed when we run the build so to properly set the right integration flow version
Now it’s time to select the “Steps” tab to identify the OIC instance from where we want to export our integration flow
If needed, we can also include the asserter recording just flagging the box. In this case we are moving (exporting / importing) the integration flow named “ECHO” and working with its *.iar file once we have exported this one.
Now you can click the “After Build” tab to configure it as below described. The *.iar extension is the default extension of the integration flow when you decide to download it.
Click save and that’s all. Our first job is properly configured now.
To proceed we are now ready to configure the second job (“import OIC project”).
In this case, the first step to be accomplished is the configuration of the “Before Build” tab as below shown and adding a “Copy Artifacts” option
And now, as we did with the first job, we can properly configure the OIC instance target, in our sample, but in this case for the import action.
We can also check the box about the “activate integration” option so that our integration flow will be imported and started just to have this one ready to be invoked by applications
Also, in this case, we can now save our configuration.
Once these operations have been completed, we are ready to test our pipeline selecting the start button on the right side of the web page and below shown
If the execution of our “build” is properly configured, we can see the “green flag” of our jobs once we run it
Furthermore, we can drill down the execution to look at the log information just in case something wrong having also the chance to download the file including the log for further analysis or if we need to share this one with other people or applications.
From the Visual Builder Studio “Home page” we can also get information about statistics and previous executions so to track the activities managed on the different resources we have
This is for sure the best way to properly manage our environments and the best approach to have under control the lifecycle of our projects and their deployment.
For further information, look at the really interesting content already published here:
Oracle Blog
https://blogs.oracle.com/vbcs/post/cicd-for-oracle-integrations-with-visual-builder-studio
https://blogs.oracle.com/integration/post/cicd-implementation-for-oic
Oracle Documentation:
RedThunder.Blog 