Overview
Executive Summary
The Oracle SOA suite was chosen as one of our key enabling technologies for enterprise application integration and developing agile business processes. Currently, several key applications have been developed on the Oracle SOA 10g suite, including the new Identity Management system (IDM) and Infinite. Oracle released a major new version of SOA, 11g and the final 10g development release was issued in September 2009.
Working with Oracle SOA 10g has revealed several problems in the past which have required considerable effort to address. These include installation problems, bugs in the JDeveloper development tool, problems following server restarts, and bugs in the human workflow service. Consultants have all advised us to upgrade to 11g as soon as possible to get a more reliable and efficient development environment.
Oracle will end support for version 10g in 2013, which will make an upgrade essential in 2012-13. In the meantime, Oracle’s support for 10g is minimal as many other users have already upgraded. If the university continues with version 10g for another year, we will waste further days dealing with the problems of 10g and increase the work required to migrate newly developed systems from 10g to 11g
Advantages of the new version:
- Better supported version of Jdeveloper (and therefore quicker development/support turnaround)
- Better workflow management (and therefore quicker development/support turnaround)
- Better deployment framework (and therefore quicker development/support turnaround)
- More stable platform (and therefore quicker development/support turnaround)
- Better integration of the overall product suite
- Better rules engine (allowing better rule based processing configuration)
- Better performance (and therefore increased capacity and throughput)
The main deliverables of the project will be:
- Technical Architecture Design for 11g platform
- SOA 11g Development Standards
- SOA 11g installations in the Dev, Test and Live environments
- Defined test suite to test basic functionality when deploying to a new SOA infrastructure
The scope of the project is limited to the above, which implies that we will run 10g and 11g applications. Separate projects will be required to implement 11g versions for each of the 10g applications for each business area.
Business Objectives and Project Deliverables
As there is no end deliverable for any business unit, there are no Business Objectives stated. The purpose of this project is to provide a new 11g platform for use in further developments and upgrades. The features of Oracle SOA 11g will be reviewed and desirable features documented for future use. Environments will be created for Dev, Test and Production as will the documentation of development, build and deployment standards.
No | Description | New or Changed (Y/N) |
O1 | Creation of Technical Architecture Design document for Oracle 11g platform. | N |
D1 | TAD for Oracle SOA 11g | N |
O2 | Review of Oracle SOA 11g features | N |
D1 | Identify and document SOA 11g features to use in future developments | N |
D2 | Documented Development standards for SOA 11g | N |
O3 | Create SOA 11g environments | N |
D1 | Build single-node development environment (virtual) | N |
D2 | Build single-node UAT test environment (virtual) | N |
D3 | Build single-node LIVE environment (virtual) | N |
D4 | Defined and documented Build process for SOA 11g Installation | N |
O4 | Repeatable Test Suite for SOA 11g deployments | N |
D1 | Defined re-usable testing functionality for BPEL | N |
D2 | Defined re-usable testing functionality for task workflow | N |
D3 | Defined re-usable testing functionality for ESB replacement | N |
O5 | Standard Deployment Mechanism for SOA 11g | N |
D1 | Automated standard deployment and implementation mechanism for 11g | N |
O6 | Review Security Model. | N |
D1 | Development Services to define security model | N |
O7 | Review 11g Monitoring Tools | N |
D1 | Produce Performance monitoring tools | N |
D2 | Create Load Testing model | N |
O8 | Determine fault handling process | N |
D1 | Replicate current 10g framework used in Infinite in 11g | N |
O9 | Review DR and Failover strategy | N |
D1 | Define strategy and test failover | N |
O10 | Review Support Requirements and Responsibilities | N |
D1 | Document Support responsibilities for Development, Dev Tech and Technology Management | N |
D2 | Document and plan technical handover to Technology Management. | N |
Scope
In Scope
The scope of the project is limited to providing a set of environments and standards for use in further projects utilising Oracle SOA 11g. It is envisaged that systems will be ported to 11g as individual projects and there will be 10g and 11g environments running LIVE systems concurrently. The following is a list of tasks determined to be in scope to deliver the overall project objective.
A review of Oracle SOA 11g to document known features and any new features deemed useful and document development standards for future projects.
Create Oracle SOA 11g DEV, TEST and LIVE environments for use in future projects to allow future development to progress with no prior environmental set-up required.
A defined and documented build process for a SOA 11g installation.
A re-usable test suite will be developed to check deployments for BPEL, task workflow and ESB replacement.
An automated standard deployment and implementation mechanism will be produced for use with all future SOA 11g projects.
Address the security model for SOA 11g and design a standard security model access to Webserver and application access.
Review and recommend performance monitoring tools for use by Development Technology and Production Management.
Review and recommend a load testing model and verify against test environments.
Build DR environments and test failover operation.
A review of support activities will be carried out and responsibilities for Development, Development Technology and Technology will be determined and documented
The provision of the generic fault handling functionality developed in SOA 10g and used in Infinite will be redeveloped for use in 11g.
Not in Scope
No new applications will be created using 11g environments as part of this project other than the project and environmental tools listed in section 2.2. No existing systems currently running in SOA 10g will be redeveloped to 11g environments at this time.
Category
The project has been classified as Very Important to ensure strategically important infrastructure is up to date and supported by the vendor.