Agent for simplifying Integration between Cloud and On-Premises apps

In the last few months I mentioned that Oracle is developing an Agent. The Agent easily integrates your on-premises application(s) with the Oracle Cloud Services. The Agent is rolling out on all production instances next week. It was publicly announced by Bruce Tierney on the 3rd of January. He is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Integration and SOA. You can read his announcement on the Oracle Integration blog.

In this first article about the Agent I will go into the architectural basics,  which components are included and how it will connect Cloud to On-premises applications. The article is based on information I presented about during OpenWorld 2015.

Current / classic integration approach

The current approach for connecting Cloud / Internet hosted applications with On-premises applications is usually through one or more firewalls, and the use of a reverse proxy, Oracle API Gateway or OHS. For this a variety of expertise is needed for example to open up inbound ports in the firewall, expose a private SOAP/REST service and configure the network routing. The SOAP/REST service can for example be implemented with SOA Suite to for example communicate with the CRM to retrieve customer data.

Let look at the current / classic approach in the diagram below:

This is going to change a lot when using the Agent. It will simplify above diagram.

Common Cloud to On-Premises Integration Patterns

Currently there are three common patterns for Cloud to On-Premises integrations. They are 1. using messaging, 2. through a proxy and 3. using an agent.

Proxy (Sync or Async) – Hybrid Cloud

• On-Premises SOA Suite is accessible with a web-Proxy in the DMZ, e.g. API Gateway or OHS.
• On-Premises SOA Suite hosts the adapter that Cloud application can invoke.
• Integration Cloud Service sends the messages through the Proxy.

Messaging (Async) – Hybrid Cloud

• On-Premises SOA Suite polls the Messaging Service.
• On-Premises SOA Suite hosts the adapter where messages can be published to.

Agent (Sync or Async)

• The agent is started on the customer’s internal network.
• The agent establishes a communications tunnel with ICS.
• Integration Cloud send messages through the tunnel to the Agent.
• The agent hosts the adapter to communicate to the On-Premises application.

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In preparation of my upcoming book about “Implementing Oracle Integration Cloud Service” the further content of this blog is redacted. If you like where this blog is going I can recommend reading the book when finished around October 2016.