When to use SOA CS vs OIC?

March 6, 2019
|
Daniel Díaz

Recently we dive in a complete migration cloud project, of all cloud integration SAAS
including a bus migration services from version 11g (on premises of course) to SOA CS
in a hybrid architecture.

It is worthy to mentioned to all newbie cloud integration consultants that when we have
the SOA CS PAAS we already count with all integration paas

So the first question or doubt that comes into the clients mind is when I have to use the
OIC (Oracle Integration Cloud) and when It is best to use the SOA CS (SOA Cloud
Service).

Note : I suppose you are an IT consultant with previous knowledge of Oracle SOA
implementation.

Advantages (OIC vs SOA CS).

OIC (Oracle integration cloud).

1. Easier to use: Due to the fact that is aimed to business consultant how do not know
as much of IT and services consumption as a IT consultant.

2. Faster and more productive: The development environment is in the cloud so the
memory that is required is minimum (required by the browser) and all the functionalities
and mapping of data between the saas an the on premises software are done by simple
drag and drop.

3. Agent Connectivity: the connection between the Paas and the on premises systems
are easily and efficiently done through Agents, this can save the client a lot of money
because of the possibility to connect to services and APIS already stables that are
working in production environments instead of migrating to a cloud SAAS.

4. Integration Environment: It is the same Paas to develop as Process Automation

and visual builder so if you want to make oracle BPM cloud or develop apps with visual
builder (JET based builder) OIC offers you the best and faster integration for both.

SOA CS (Service Oriented Architecture Cloud Service).

1. The richest collection of components to integration: As B2B Adapter, MFC, API

management and streaming monitoring.

2. Complete Portability: It is the same development environment that SOA on premise

(with jdev editor) so if you already have your services architecture, migrate it to the
cloud it is just to deployed the services in it. So the migration it is as effortless and
unnoticeable as possible.

3. The monitoring of the integration instances services is outstanding do to the fact that
EM (Enterprise Manager) is available so you can watch on it all the instances process
and the flow data.

4. It has unlimited capabilities of messaging transaction per connection and unlimited

capabilities about message size.

5. It has more control over the enrichments, transformation, managing and routing of the
messages and services as it is more manual and it has more details components to work
on it (Better for complex services that already invoke another services).

Disadvantages (OIC vs SOA CS).

OIC (Oracle integration cloud).

1. It has limitation of size per messages and of messages or transactions per

connection.

2. The components of connection are not as rich as the SOA CS components.

3. Once you implement this integration product you will be bound to it in the cloud for a
long term because you will not can shift it to an on premise system.

4. It is not the most suitable for complex orchestration transaction that implement loops
and complex enrichment as BPEL product of soa suite.

SOA CS (Service Oriented Architecture Cloud Service).

1.. It requires more investments because of a higher price on the license.

2. It requires a more specialized IT staff that knows more about the development with
BPEL, OSB and XSLT and XQUERIES transformation.

3. It is slower and harder to develop atomic and simple integrations than in OIC.
4. It requires the management and monitoring of IT infrastructure staff on an additional
product.

Conclusion.

The OIC is more suitable to implement the integration when you you want to do the
integration with services and apis already in the cloud with the on premises system.

When the integration is simple as per instance just extract data from on premises
services and legacy to cloud apis and apps or the opposite the OIC is the best option.

Now when it is needed to issue big amount of messages or the size of

files and messages that require to be sent is larger than the limit of OIC for it then SOA
CS is the best option to allow the integration.

Is the integration or requirement involves B2B, API Management or streaming

monitoring then it will be necessary to apply SOA CS.

When logic of orchestrated transaction or services is complex it is recommended to use

SOA CS with all BPEL features but all can be done in the OIC, so I do not
see necessary to buy the SOA CS just for this reason because of the additional
investment and time that require.

If a SOA architecture is already built on premises and working well and the requirement
is to connect the already existing services with cloud systems the OIC would be perfect
for it, through an agent the integration would be really easy.

In our case we need to rebuilt some osb 11g services in 12c version because the editors
changed in this case from eclipse to jdev and the difference of development and
capabilities that we need to add are quite noticeable.

As we will be working integrating on premises back-ends, legacy and apps then the SOA
CS is the right option in conjunction with some services in OIC, this is mainly because it
allows us to incorporate in our complex orchestrated and develop services connection to
cloud APIS in our already proved and tested BPELs logic so the work in some services
would be minimize because we will not need to do from scratch complex orchestrated
services.
If the client wants an Integration that can be shift from cloud to on premises effortlessly
then SOA CS is the choice.

To finish here is a chapter done By ORACLE highlighting the advantages of each

product.