How to get a DevOps environment in less than 2 min?

In this short video demonstration I'd like to show you how easy it is to get a full development platform provided as a service to enable an agile development process and to automate DevOps & delivery. 

Here I am using Oracle DevCS 16.4.1, which has a new UI and over 30 new features. The video has been created as part of my presentation with Sven Bernhardt at DOAG Conference in Nuremberg.

Continuous Integration and continuous delivery are the main DevOps building blocks. Continuous integration includes the phases: Build => Test => QA. Whereas continuous delivery is focussing on => Publish => Deploy => Release. The Oracle DeveloperCS provides tool support for all these phases. The good thing is that it comes as a free entitlement with trial and paid orders for multiple Oracle Cloud Services, you can get it in less than 2 minutes and you might not need more than 10 mouse-clicks. 

Try it yourself on https://cloud.oracle.com/developer_service.

OTN Appreciation Day: Establish DevOps with Oracle Developer Cloud Service

This post has been published as part of the ‘OTN Appreciation Day’. Thanks to Tim Hall to start the initiative. Great idea! The amount of people who already confirmed their participation surprises me. A nice demonstration on how many smart brains are willing to share their knowledge within an excellent community. 

The idea of the ‘OTN Appreciation Day’ is to write something about our favorite feature. I take the opportunity to turn the spotlight on the Developer Cloud Service – a service that caught my attention since OpenWorld 2016. From our practical experience we know about the importance of DevOps and testing. A high test coverage makes your life much easier if you want to move from onprem to the cloud or if you like to upgrade to a newer version of your integration suite.

What is the Developer Cloud Service?

The DevCS is a complete development platform provided as a service to enable an agile development process and to automate DevOps & delivery. It covers most of the DevOps cycle including Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Collaboration. 

What many people do not know: Developer CS is included as a free entitlement with trial and paid orders of:

• Java Cloud Service, 
• Java Cloud Service-SaaS Extension, 
• Messaging Cloud Service, 
• Mobile Cloud Service, 
• SOA Cloud Service and 
• Application Container Cloud

What‘s inside?

Do you know the situation: You would like to start a new project but before you can actually concentrate on the main goals you have to establish an issue tracking, build & deployment automation and a wiki! The Developer CS solves that issue. Using this service Developers can commit changes to a Git repository, create tasks and assign them to team members, define and collaborate on projects through wiki services and continuously build and deploy their application to the cloud or On-Premise with Hudson. There’s also the ability to track and monitor deployments and then within Java Cloud Services one can analyze their deployed and running application through Enterprise Manager. In addition it can be integrated with IDEs like JDeveloper, NetBeans and Eclipse. 

Overall the service contains the following components:

• Version Management - Git
• Build Automation
• Ant, Maven, Gradle, npm, Grunt, Bower, Gulp, Command line
• Continuous Integration - Hudson
• Issue Tracking
• Code review
• Deployment automation
• Agile process management
• Wiki
• Activity Stream  

If your code is hosted in an external Git repository, DevCS can map to it and still provide you with the rest of the services including reviewing the code and automating builds. WebHooks allow DevCS to notify external system about events inside DevCS. This for example can let you notify JIRA of a code commit related to a specific issue, notify Slack of a build fail etc.

Get Started today!

Find more Tutorials, Videos, eBooks, Whitepapers, Documentation and Forums at https://cloud.oracle.com/developer_service.

My Oracle OpenWorld Sessions in 2016

Exciting days are behind us. As every year we visited Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. To summarize it briefly: It was again a great event! There was an amazing and special spirit around. 

Increasing Cloud Adoption

What we noticed in the last twelve month is that Cloud became reality for our clients. I remember my visit at OOW in 2011 when Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Public Cloud. That time cloud felt a bit far away for a SOA / BPM solution architect like me working in EMEA. I still had the same feeling at OOW 2013 when Oracle announced a bunch of new cloud services like Database Cloud, Java Cloud, Documents Cloud and some others. It looked promising but it still seemed to be far away for our clients in the European market. I remember that I said to a colleague: "It looks great but I think it takes another 5 - 10 years that our clients will start using it". Now I have to state, that I was completely wrong here. 

In 2016 we noticed a significant increase of customer requests asking for consulting in cloud strategy, cloud architecture and cloud development. There is a wide range of clients which are starting initiatives in these areas - global players, medium-sized companies, e-commerce clients and startups. For this reason our company decided to introduce a new Competence Center "Cloud" in order to consolidate skills across all of our locations, to optimize knowledge exchange and to to define aspects like architecture blueprints and best practices.

Presentation Material

Things keep on changing – today even faster as in the past. Therefore it is important that we open our minds and leave our comfort zones. For this reason I left my comfort zone about BPM this year to focus on DevOps, Internet of Things (IoT) an of course Cloud Computing.

Together with my colleague (and friend) Sven Bernhardt I presented the following session:

1) Test-Driven Cloud Development with Oracle SOA Cloud Service and Oracle Developer Cloud Service [CON4620]

Abstract: Automated tests are key for quality assurance and for ensuring business agility from a long-term perspective. That is especially important in complex integration projects if you develop your integrations on-premises or in the cloud. If a hybrid strategy is used, it is important to have a consistent testing approach for cloud and on-premises. In this session learn how to implement a consistent approach based on Oracle SOA Cloud Service that works on-premises and in the cloud. See how this approach can test BPEL, BPMN, SB, Java, human tasks, XSLT, and XQuery across all relevant test layers (elementary unit tests, component tests, end-to-end tests) consistently.

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I also had the honour to present along with Lucas Jellema (Amis), Lonneke Dikmans (eProseed Europe s.a.), Wilfred van der Deijl (The Future Group) and Mark Simpson (Griffiths Waite) in an ACE Director Cloud Session:

2) Soaring Through the Clouds: Live Demo on Integrating 10 Oracle PaaS Services [CON3031] 

Abstract: Oracle ACE directors have a new mission: complete a complex end-to-end business flow across at least 10 Oracle platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services—in front of a live audience. This session shows how a document-driven human workflow triggers an integration flow to update a third-party application, which in turn emits events that are processed in real time and results in findings that are published through a REST API in a user-friendly front end. The Oracle PaaS cast includes Oracle Documents Cloud Service, Oracle Process Cloud Service, Oracle Sites Cloud Service, and Oracle Integration Cloud Service, Oracle Java Cloud Service, Oracle SOA Cloud Service, and an Oracle JavaScript Enterprise Toolkit application on a Node.js container on Oracle Application Container Cloud.

Feel free to download the slides and start playing with the different cloud services!

New Book: Best Practices for Knowledge Workers (digital edition)

A couple of weeks ago the book "Best Practices for Knowledge Workers" has been published by Future Strategies Inc. in association with the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC).

The authors Nathaniel Palmer, Keith Swenson, Jim Sinur, Dr Setrag Khoshafian, Linus Chow, et al describe Adaptive Case Management (ACM) in the current era of digitization, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent BPMS and BPM Everywhere. We (Juergen Kress, Ricardo Puttini and myself) are very proud contributers in the digital edition of this book. With our chapter „ACM Methodology: Best practices to design and implement solutions for knowledge workers“ we are sharing our experiences from multiple ACM implementations.

ACM Methodology Chapter 

BPM-based solutions have brought major advances to work organization and automation. However, given BPM’s strong basis on formal workflow definition, oftentimes BPM solutions are not well suited for work scenarios where a precise workflow cannot be strictly defined. Work in such scenarios is highly dependent on knowledge-based decisions about activities and outcomes, leading to multiple work paths and business rules that can become quite complex or even unfeasible to model and completely automate. In these cases, a different technology support approach is required. The focus is not to isolate and automate decisions and rules, but rather to deliver opportunistic information support to the knowledge worker to accomplish them. Adaptive Case Management (ACM) rises as a successful design pattern for this.

The ACM methodology described in our chapter covers typical software engineering disciplines: business modeling, analysis, design and implementation. This approach provides well-understood separation of interest criteria, which aims at making it easier for business analysts and software architects to understand and incorporate ACM design practices into their current professional skills. Additionally, specialized business models and software artifacts required for the successful realization of ACM design pattern are presented and developed in details in the following sections.

In order to make the concepts and the development activities more clear, each section within this chapter includes a case study example. Therefore, the reader is able to practice each exercise and to template the deliverables of each phase of the development. The ACM methodology was developed over the past years during execution of actual ACM projects in different customers and industry areas. Therefore, it brings together practical experience and real use of existing ACM software platforms.

Visit the Future Strategies bookstore here.

  

ACM Methodology Kit

As part of the book Best Practices for Knowledge Workers (digital edition) we published an Adaptive Case Management Methodology. The proposed ACM Methodology is based on the five phases, which covers typical software engineering disciplines: Business Modeling, Visualization, Analysis, Design and Implementation. New software artifact models for ACM user interfaces (ACM Workspace) and ACM solution analysis and design (ACM Canvas) are also among the contributions of this work. ACM design leverages the recently established Case Management Modeling Notation (CMMN v1.1). Templates of software artifacts, developed for each methodology phase, are also presented. These support a guided outcome and ensure projects progress and success.

Download the Kit.

Oracle SOA / BPM 12c - Useful Upgrade Content

With this post I'd like to provide a list of useful material regarding Oracle SOA 12c Upgrade.

• Oracle® Fusion Middleware Upgrading to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Infrastructure
  https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1221/core/INFUP/toc.htm 
• Oracle® Fusion Middleware Upgrading SOA Suite and Business Process Management
  https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1221/core/FUPSS/toc.htm
• Best practices upgrade blogs from Oracle:
  https://blogs.oracle.com/SOA/tags/upgrade    
• Slideshare (UKOUG 2015): What's Stopping You from Upgrading to Oracle SOA Suite 12c?
  http://www.slideshare.net/DaniloSchmiedel1/whats-stopping-you-from-upgrading-to-oracle-soa-suite-12c
• Slideshare: Road to SOA Suite 12c
  http://de.slideshare.net/opitzconsulting/doag-2014-roadtosoasuite12cschmiedel 
• Upgrade videos:
  http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1221/cross/upgrade_videos.htm
• 2 Minute Tech Tip
  https://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/entry/2mtt 
• Troubleshooting the Upgrade
  http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1213/core/FUPSS/know_base.htm#FUPSS339 

In addition I'd like to mention the SOA Expert Series. In this webinar, David Shaffer (Middleworks),  Deepak Arora (Oracle A-Team), Antony Reynolds & Kathryn Lustenberger (Oracle Prod Mgmt) and myself shared tips, tricks and best practices for upgrading to SOA Suite 12c. You can download the slides as well as the recording from middleworks.com.
 

Upgrading Oracle SOA Suite from 11g to 12c

Today I'd like to share my presentation on upgrading Oracle SOA Suite from 11g to 12c. It contains information on how the product evolved the last couple of years. It also explains different upgrade strategies, the difference between in-flight upgrade and migration, important pre-upgrade tasks, the upgrade steps itself and post-upgrade steps.   

Additionally it lists the experiences and upgrade results that we've achieved in two different scenarios: in-flight upgrade as well as migration. 

Road to SOA Suite 12c

Moving from a File-Based MDS Repository to a Database-Based MDS in Oracle BPM / SOA 12c

You might have noticed that Business Rules editing during runtime is not available in SOA / BPM 12c domains that have been installed from the Quickstart distribution. This is because for those domain configs the underlying MDS is configured as a file-based repository. For the development in our projects we very often use a SOA / BPM Compact Domain. The change of Business Rules without re-deployment is quite important for us because we work a lot with Adaptive Case Management – and there Business Rules and live changes are a key benefit (which we are also demonstrating in demos / POCs / etc.).

Rules Editing in SOA Composer (with DB-based MDS)

You can move from a file-based repository to a database-based repository. In our CattleCrew-Blogpost Re-configure a compact domain to use a DB-based MDS instead of a File-based MDS my colleague Sven Bernhardt and me describe how to do that. Please note that you cannot move from a database-based repository to a file-based repository. Please also note that this approach is not documented in the Oracle documentation, so it is not officially supported

After going through the steps below it should be possible to edit rules and DVMs during runtime.