Oracle Messaging Cloud Service (OMCS) on Trial

This post provides a fairly detailed introduction to registering and creating a trial instance of Oracle Messaging Cloud Service. We have written this as in our book Introducing Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) we use Oracle Messaging Cloud  Service(OMCS) in chapter 8 to illustrate message based integration outside  of ICS. Whist we describe the process for OMCS, the mechanics are similar for a number of the iPaaS offerings from Oracle including ICS, PCS but not SOA CS as this is a far more complex product and the fee charging structure is rather different.

In the screenshots of the process that follows, we have blurred out key credentials, this is purely for personal security reasons.

The first step is to create the trial of OMCS, to do this you need an Oracle account. This can be done from the main Oracle site. If you already have an account with Oracle Technology Network (OTN) or Oracle community then you are already sorted as Oracle operates a single sign on.

There is no giving over credit card or bank details in this process, so you won’t start incurring costs and getting a bill at the end of the month you never expected. The information is purely to ensure Oracle can communicate with you as you can see in the following screenshots.

With that all setup, and signed in you can head over to http://cloud.oracle.com and navigate to messaging under platform as a service (PaaS), and click on the try it button. This will take you the first step of requesting a trial instance of OMCS. If the site doesn’t recognise you as logged in then, just use your newly created account to login.

Next step provide some extra information needed to setup up your instance of OMCS, as you can see here …

As you can see this is about validating the appropriate contact details, you wish to someone else to have the administrative contact details. The rest of the information is for helping to define your cloud domain, such as indicating which data centre to use, the domain identity etc. The URLs at the bottom represent the key web addresses for the messaging service once instantiated.

It is important that you retain a note of which data centre and the domain name you have used in addition to your user credentials as this information is needed to login to the service’s web UI at a later date. This is illustrated in part by the screen shot below.

Once the details are provided you can progress with a confirmation button at the bottom of the page (omitted from this screenshot). This will lead you to a details confirmation screen(shown next), so if you spot an error you can step back or bail out of the process.

With the details ready, click Done. You will relatively quickly receive an email with the OMCS instance details although you don’t really need it, as the critical URLs are provided on the previous screen.

Next step is to fire up the server instances. As you can see in the screenshot below we’re actually given two services – the Developer Cloud and OMCS. As with a number of Oracle’s offerings you get several components, namely Developer Cloud and OMCS itself. We won’t go into Developer Cloud beyond saying that it provides a core technologies to realise Continuous Integration methodology – so there is a GIT repository, an instance of Hudson etc.

To get the servers instantiated we need to click on the Activate button (as shown below). The process of activating these services is about 15 minutes, as behind the scenes a new WebLogic server, storage and configuration needs to be provisioned and configured.

With the instance provisioned things are ready to go and you can look at details such as the service status as shown below, which includes indicators of scheduled maintenance. Although when it comes to such things Oracle will email the administrator with the details of maintenance Windows, what is happening and the corresponding impact – which could range from just losing the web interface through a full brief shutdown. The following to screen show the status after the service has been running for a period of time.

We would recommend that with the service activated, that this is probably the best time to create and grant other user permissions if you are sharing the he use of the trial. This can be done by using the Users drop down at the top of the admin page as you can see below.

In addition to the status/overview shown above you can see that ‘business metrics’ are offered. These are business metrics in the sense of they will provide insight into how much of the available capacity offered by the service, such as the number of connections that have occurred, volumes for message in storage etc. as you can see below.

So where do I configure my queues ?

In everything you have seen so far there is no apparent location to configure the Queues and Topics etc.  That us because today there isn’t one and in practical terms you don’t really need one either. The JMS API provides for the creation of Queues and Topics and OMCS has a very rich REST API that allows you to manage OMCS. All of which is for another blog as the functionality provided with the book resolves all the issues of creating JMS queues etc.

A Couple of things to note …

One of the things that cloud solutions allows is a higher rate of change and development. Not only does this impact the availability of new features, performance improvements but also presentation as well. As you can see below that Oracle are offering a newly updated dashboard, although functionally things are not changing dramatically.

Linking ICS and OMCS

Connecting ICS and OMCS.  It is important to understand that presently connecting ICS and OMCS via the adaptor requires that both services reside within the same Oracle Cloud Domain.