Oracle integration cloud service provides an agent feature that allows
SaaS applications to integrate with on-premises applications such as
Oracle e-business suite Oracle's database and SAP.
With the agent, you don't need to open up inbound ports on the firewall and expose
private SOAP-based web services. This eliminates common security and
complexity issues associated with integrating on-premises applications
from outside the firewall.
The agent framework primarily consists of a SaaS agent that
runs in Oracle ICS, and the on-promises conductivity agent that
runs behind the firewall within the customer's data center where
the on-promised applications reside.
The SaaS agent is a built-in component in ICS. However you are responsible for
downloading and installing the on premises connectivity agent in
your on-premises environment.
Let's take a look at how to install and use an on-premises agent for outbound
integration with on-premises applications.
Before installing the on-premises agent, I need to create an agent group.
Think of an agent group is a cluster of agents that can work as a group process messages.
Every agent needs to be associated with an agent group identifier.
When creating a new age group I provide a meaningful name and accept
the default value for identifier and agent type.
Note that default identifier value is the agent group name I entered
but in upper case.
The identifier value can be changed, but the agent type cannot be changed.
Agent groups that contain multiple agents provide load distribution and high availability.
You can have multiple agent groups for functional categorization.
Once the agent group is created, I need to download the conductivity agent installer and
install it in the same subnet as the on-premises applications
On the machine where the agent binary was downloaded, I unzip the installer file
and change the file permissions to be executable.
One thing I want to mention here before running the agent installer is that I need to
have JRE version 1.7 or higher preinstalled on the on-premises host machine and
include it in the path.
Now I execute the installer file with these properties: -h specifies
the ICS hostname and port; -u specify ICS username;
-p specifies the password and -ad specifies the agent group identifier
that was generated when I created the agent group.
Besides these required properties, there are some optional ones. For example, if
your on-premises host includes a proxy server, you can use -ph to specify
the outbound proxy host name and -pp for the proxy host port.
During installation, Oracle WebLogic Server is installed. The on-promises agent is deployed.
And all on promises adapters are registered.
Once installation is complete and agent instances is created for interacting with
Oracle Integration Cloud Service.
I verify that the agent instance was created by going to the Agent Groups
page, and I can see here that the agent count was increased by one.
On the ICS instance, I create a connection to access my own premises
applications with this newly created agent group.
The process of doing this is very similar to creating a regular connection.
The difference is I need to select the agent group for accessing
on-premises applications in addition to specifying the WSDL URL and
security policy and credentials.
Here I provide conductivity and security details as I do when creating
a regular connection.
Using agents, I can easily and quickly integrate SaaS applications with
on-premises applications without introducing any security concerns.