There is a clear and strong movement in the industry to move their business into the Cloud, ranging from Dev and Test to mission critical production enterprise applications
Source:
Forrester's 10 Cloud Computing Predictions For 2018
https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2017/11/07/forresters-10-cloud-computing-predictions-for-2018/#54c9bad04ae1
Forbes Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts, 2017
https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2017/04/29/roundup-of-cloud-computing-forecasts-2017/#35e5f43831e8
These are some of the challenges we hear from customers who are thinking about moving their On Premise applications to the Cloud
Developer/DevOps: Push of a button provisioning, does not need hardware/software procurement, No Ops resources required for installation/configuration, No incremental capital expenditure. The Data structures designed for oracle forms and the actual data currently on oracle database needs to be moved to cloud without much effort.
VP of IT: I have new projects requiring new infrastructure that I was not aware of when capital budget planning was done. The older versions of Oracle Forms and Reports are often overwhelmed by the increasing effort to keep applications on older hardware and software platforms. Can we move to Oracle Cloud using existing OnPremise License(BYOL)?
LOB Leaders: The older client-server architecture used by Oracle Forms is not suitable for moving applications to a web-based architecture because of the high frequency of internal database calls Oracle Forms makes to the Oracle Database engine. Can Forms applications be moved to cloud?
I.T Admin: I need an automated way to install and configure the complex oracle forms with oracle database.
End Users: Irrespective of where the application resides, its consumer always wants good performance, reliability and security. Overall I don’t want my end user experience to change.
ROBUST INFRASTRUCTURE
Oracle provides the broadest variety of deployment options from a single vendor in market today – bare metal servers, virtual servers, on-premises systems – and network connectivity options to enable hybrid Cloud options.
Highly configurable private overlay networks – moves management and IO out of the hypervisor and enables lower overhead and bare metal instances
OPTIMIZED TO RUN ORACLE WORKLOADS
ORACLE CLOUD PLATFORM: Integration between OCI and PaaS services such as Database Cloud Service and Java Cloud Service deliver building blocks businesses seek in developing, deploying, and scaling the enterprise applications that power their future. Oracle also offers Oracle Management Cloud (OMC), which provides monitoring, alerting and reporting across on-premises and cloud infrastructures providing visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
ORACLE DATABASE: Oracle Databases scale to many times the storage capacity and performance of competitors, reaching 100’s of terabytes of capacity and millions of IOPS per instance.
END-TO-END PERFORMANCE: Customers have the unique ability to provision and control the fastest compute, storage, and database offerings on the fastest network with the best price-performance in the cloud for Oracle Applications and database applications.
HIGHLY ELASTIC COMPUTE, STORAGE AND NETWORK
Oracle supports the networking performance and control that enterprises require. Acting as an extension to existing enterprise networking topologies allows companies to bring their private IPs over to our cloud, thus not having to re-write that code.
Oracle’s modern IaaS infrastructure provides a Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) offering customers network isolation (for security) and configuration flexibility (for ease of use).
Bare metal cloud services offer industry leading scale and performance at lower cost
No hypervisor overhead – no degradation, no jitter, no variability
Dynamically attachable Block Storage with consistent general purpose IOPS
NOTE: In this demo use case, we showcase “Agility” and “Cost Savings” features of OCI
Moving your open source application deployment to the Oracle Cloud delivers amazing benefits across your organization in many ways:
Agility
Spin up additional Dev / Test instances on the fly
Scale up compute resources on the fly during business peaks
Enterprise Grade Performance
Get uncompromised, deterministic performance for your enterprise apps and database
OCI was built from the ground up to be the highest performing, most reliable and most secure IaaS in the industry, and it is.
OCI delivers guaranteed latency of < 100µs within an Availability Domain, < 500µs between Ads and ~100ms between Regions and does not suffer from noisy neighbor syndrome
Unlike any other IaaS, OCI provides the option to install and run directly on bare metal which offers the highest performance since there is no VM layer on top of the hardware. In this demo we’ll show you how we’ll run the Java application with MySQL Database on bare metal.
OCI was also built from the ground up using an NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) storage fabric, which offers the highest storage and I/O performance in the industry.
Enterprise Grade Performance also means no shortcuts for world class security. OCI delivers the industry’s best architecture for enterprise security,
Disaster Recovery
Backup and Restore in the Cloud - no longer a risk or headache
Cost Savings
Customers can expect to see significant total cost of ownership savings as a result of leveraging Oracle’s economies of scale
Scale-up / scale down as needed instead of always having to spend on high water mark infrastructure
Focus on Your Core Business
Leave the IT/infrastructure headaches to Oracle, a proven enterprise service provider
So let’s start our demo overview!
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) combines the elasticity and utility of public cloud with the granular control, security, and predictability of on-premises infrastructure to deliver a set of tightly integrated, high-performance, high availability and cost-effective infrastructure services. These services can be used to build and run Oracle Workloads better than any other cloud vendor’s environment. As a result, organizations have the option of moving their Oracle Forms applications to a modern cloud environment with minimal changes.
Primary Proof Points
Maximize agility
Total Choice of Deployment – gives options among shared tenancy public cloud, dedicated single tenancy public cloud, On-premises private cloud consistent with public cloud and hybrid architectures that combine each of the options to suit customer needs, and evolve as those needs change.
Open Architecture – allows easy movement of workloads to cloud or back to on-premises- no usage of proprietary, cloud only tools that can’t run elsewhere
Maximize efficiency
Any size any workload – Wide range of VM Shapes to choose for creating instances on OCI
Massive and non-variable performance - high throughput non-oversubscribed network gives the ability to run most demanding workloads on Oracle Cloud with consistently good results.
Minimize costs –
Pay for what you consume – Spin instances only when required
Automation – use of custom images to spin instances multiple times
One of the Key Business Drivers is to maximize agility. OCI proves agility aspects in supporting easy scaling, different deployment options and open architecture.
Shared Tenant: In this demo we showcase the deployment of an Oracle Forms application on a shared tenant and how you can easily deploy across different tenancies from a single set of shared source custom images with the help of storage buckets and the policies.
Build Once Run Anywhere: We have already created a custom image with all the required setup for this demo. So it will reduce lot of time and effort for the user. So with the help of custom image we can re-create the demo environment as many times needed.
No Proprietary Cloud-Only Tools: We can use the same Oracle database Import / Export built in tool that is used On-Premises in the Cloud environment as well. Even the custom script used for generating Forms binaries in On-Premises can be used for Cloud deployment as well.
Move Oracle Workloads: Oracle Cloud is specifically architected to run Oracle DB and applications better than any other cloud. So, moving Oracle Forms applications to the cloud will still have the benefits of performance and will become more scalable/available in the Cloud.
OCI is the only efficient choice to support hybrid cloud with distinguished scalable solutions to offer.
Virtual Machine support in 4 different Shapes – Based on the need, we can efficiently decide on different hardware configuration options provided by OCI as different VM Shapes.
High Throughput - Due to Non - Over Subscribed networks, better network architecture, running VMs on same bare metal servers deliver unmatched throughput which is far better than the competition.
Cost reduction is key to any Enterprise.
Instances on Demand: OCI gives options to spin images using templates called custom images across tenants as and when needed. This avoids unnecessary cost and support to non-operational instances.
Re-Used Resources: As most of the network configurations in OCI are software based., they can be re-used. For example, a Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) once created will give you freedom to spin instances under 3 different subnets. Instances that are not used can be shutdown to reduce the cost. Customers can also use the Bring Your Own License (BYOL) program that enables them to leverage their investment in existing on-premises licenses in their journey to the cloud.
BYOL FAQ Reference - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/bring-your-own-license/faq/index.html
Custom Images: Creation of re-usable instance templates (Custom Images) and shareable object storage spaces (Storage Buckets) are helpful reduce disk cost and also leverage automation options
API Support, CLI Tools - The entire OCI operations are open to customers through SDKs (CLIs) , APIs (Python & Java) and REST support. This reduces the cost of writing tools / applications to monitor/manage the OCI operations.
At a simple level, we’re going to lift and shift our Oracle Forms Application in two pieces, the App and the Database tiers.
The storyboard illustrates the different aspects involved in the lift and shift of an Oracle Forms application from On-Premise to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This is not do depict the architecture diagram of the demo.
NOTE
The PaaS part of the story is a future implementation plan of Exporting Database dump files from On-Premise to Database Service in OCI
So let’s quickly Click Through the demo!
This demo primarily focus on moving the Oracle Forms Application to OCI. We have a sample Summit Forms Application which runs on Weblogic, binding to data on Oracle Database.
Note: This application is fully functional on an On-Premise instance, which we have on OCI for demo purpose.
First let us review the setup and functionality of Oracle Forms Summit application running from the On-Premise instance.
On the On-Premise Instance, we check for services needed by our Oracle Forms application
We see that Oracle Database, OHS and Weblogic services are up and running
Working Forms Summit application is running from the On-Premise Environment
Now we shall explore how the IT department can cater to the infrastructure needs of the DevOps / QA Leads using OCI
We will see how new Cloud instances can be easily created using the existing network options on different domains using templates and re-create the On-Premise environment for lift and shift
Logon to OCI Account
We have a Shared Tenant Allocated
Each Tenant is sliced to Compartments and Compartments are isolated resources for users
It is highly secure. Each Compartment / User access permissions are driven by groups, roles and policies
We have the On-Premise instance on OCI for demo purpose
OCI offers software based network options to minimize cost and maximize agility. We can create Virtual Networks and associate it with single or multiple instances. In OCI this entity is called Virtual Cloud Network (VCN).
In this demo we showcase how to create and re-use a VCN.
Creating Virtual Cloud Network is just as easy as few clicks from the UI and it can be also achieved through REST End-points and SDKs / CLI
Creation of VCN also creates subnet configurations for each Availability Domain (AD), Routing Tables, Security Lists and Internet Gateways
All these can be created in a custom and controlled way as well
We have created a VCN by name “forms” for this demo and use it for both the On-Premise and Cloud instances
Security lists control the access to the network using the rules binding to them
In OCI we have Ingress and Egress rules to control the inward and outward traffic, which can be statefull or stateless
We can edit each rule, add or delete it to specify a specific port level accessibility
This gives full freedom of choice to secure our instance and hook it to any network on OCI and Outside
We see that port 22 is opened by default to access the instances attached to the network by SSH by default
The template images can be imported on to a desired compartment with a custom name for identity isolation
This can be done by providing the Object Storage URL, which is in reality a Pre-Authenticated URL created at object storage level
Pre-Authenticated URLs are more secure and portable
Now we are importing the image template as a Custom Image by name “LASC_Cloudform”
The IT Admins can use this custom image multiple times to spin instances on this compartment
You can directly Launch any number of instances from a Custom Image as long as resources are available
You can see that a Custom Image support multiple shapes (A Shape is a combination of Compute, RAM and default Disk size)
At the time of creating instance from a custom image, we can select the Name, Availability Domain, a VCN and Subnet associated with Availability Domain and any of the supported shape
For easy of demo and access between the systems, a public key same as On-Premise can be used during instance creation
OCI also gives us the freedom to provide a hostname at the point of instance creation
OCI may take 5 to 10 Minutes to create a desired instance from custom image based on the shape selected
For this demo purpose, we have chosen a shape that will provide 40GB disk space, 7.5GB RAM and 1 OCPU as Compute
The instance “formscloud” is up and running and we can see that it is re-using the VCN we had for the On-Premise instance
As the SSH port is by default open on the VCN, we can take the Public IP address and focus on our next step – LIFT & SHIFT of application
We just witnessed how easy it is for IT Admins to create the instance on OCI and now the DevOps Leads can access this instance and migrate the application
We will now see how the DevOps team can actually perform the lift and shift of the application
Using the same SSH tools like PuTTy, we can access the Cloud Instance to verify the required services availability
We can see that the OHS Web Server, Oracle Database and Weblogic are available
We now export the data from the On-Premise Instance to prepare for moving to OCI
Similarly, we do the packaging of the application files which is part of the live demo
DevOps team uses the bundled app tier and DB tier content shifted from On-Premise to Cloud instance using SCP
As we have used same public key as On-Premise and have shared the same VCN. Ingress and Egress rules set properly to enable a communication between the instances, we see a hassle-free data transfer
The database is created and data is loaded on to the Oracle Database on OCI Compute using the standard import procedures
OCI supports open architecture, which is enabling us to use the same methods and tools to bring up the application on Cloud, the same way as On-Premise
The Oracle Forms Summit Application files copied over are compiled in the Cloud Instance using the same method followed in an On-Premise environment
We now witnessed how the application being moved from On-Premise instance to Cloud Instance by moving the application tier and database tier workload
It is just a different IP address / hostname to access the same application deployed now in OCI
In Summary, we have achieved the lift and shift of an Oracle Forms Application. Moving Java & Oracle DB to OCI using the features of OCI with ease and no change in functionality.
We have also seen different aspects of OCI like networking and custom images.