Understanding Integration Cloud and how to get the most out of your implementation

Tag: agent

September 21 – New OIC Articles

Latest updates, lots about use of Streaming with OIC ….

Connecting directly to DBaaS – ICS Definitive Tip #7

DBaaSEnriching an integration from data in a database or DBaaS (Database as a Service) is not an unusual requirement. Many integration use cases today need to access a database that is on-premises. The means to connect to the database is fairly obvious – the connection agent. Our book goes into a lot more detail as to why that is, and the implications of using database connections.

However when it comes to Oracle’s DBaaS a service it would be very easy to assume that given that you’re using two different parts of Oracle’s PaaS that it would be straight forward to connect the two together without an agent. However, at least today whether its on-premises or DBaaS you need to use a connection agent. This does mean that you’ll need an IaaS node to host the connection agent.

This quirk is driven by the fact that there are some scenarios that this does actually make sense. For example – the Oracle domains need to have a high level of isolation, so when the DBaaS is in another domain then the decoupling via the agent makes sense. When your database is in a different zone of the cloud – then you’re running DB calls across what is effectively a wide are network – not good.

Differentiating the ICS Agent Types – Definitive Tip #5

In our book we talked about the difference between the agents offered by ICS, namely the Connection  and Execution agents. Whilst we differentiated the two, we did focus on the connection agent as this is the type we expect to see used in most cases. However the execution agent still suffers from a level of confusion, and it has been helped by being called  ‘ICS on-premises’.

As part of a number of recent conversations the questions and confusion of what the execution agent is and how it works has come up. There is the well known saying ‘a picture is as good as a 1000 words’ which prompted us to develop the diagram below as a power point slide – in its power point form much of the detail is used as an animated build up.

ICS Agent Comparison

ICS Connection Agent on Windows?

We have seen the question a number of times (such as here) regarding whether or not the ICS Connection agent or (Execurtion) Worker Agent can run on Windows. Presently when establishing an agent ICS provides a Bash shell executable (BSX) file.

We’ve not heard any suggestion this is likely to change – but when you consider that the Agent is essentially a WebLogic server with parts of ICS incorporated into it. You can see that from a production perspective, demand for Windows support isn’t going to be huge.

That said, when researching, testing, developing and testing a lot of people do use a Windows platform. So being able to use the agent is attractive.  So what options are available for a Windows environment?

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