By Sudhakar Peddibhotla, Sr. Director of Engineering, Enterprise IDM Product Development
Today’s companies operate a significant portion of their IT workloads in a multi-cloud hybrid environment where their workloads are spread across traditional on-premise infrastructure as well as private and public clouds. Many companies, however, have not yet seized the opportunity to deploy their enterprise identity solutions on the same cloud platforms that they leverage elsewhere. Running Identity and Access Management (IAM), on the cloud of customer choice, allows customers to fully leverage the comprehensive features of the enterprise IDM to secure their heterogenous workloads while taking advantage of the quick deployment and ease of use offered by cloud options.
To truly benefit from cloud economics, you need cloud native tooling and modern deployment options. Oracle is taking a three-pronged approach to drive this simplicity.
First, we recently added the IDM stack to OCI marketplace. Using the Identity Management command line interface (IDMCLI), customers can easily spin up IDM instances in OCI infrastructure. The CLI does the core tasks of resource provisioning, installation, database setup, configuration and intercomponent wiring. From a user point of view, it’s just a single command to run on their client machine. See related blog here.
Second, we are in the process of certifying our enterprise IDM components on Kubernetes, leveraging Weblogic Operator for Kubernetes. Once complete, the same IDMCLI can also create IDM deployments on any Kubernetes provider, and run IDM components as containers. With Kubernetes, customer can also start to leverage its ecosystem of cluster management solutions including logging, monitoring, seamless scale out and scale in, upgrade and traffic management. Moving to a container-based model, also enables building IDM roadmap features via microservices. We will describe our new microservices in the near future.
Microservices architecture allows a different aspect of hybrid deployments: the ability to run part of the IDM stack on cloud. This is especially useful when core elements of the IDM solution have to say within the enterprise firewall, while other, resource heavy or variable workloads can leverage cloud elasticity.
Third, we are emphasizing the usage of the IDMCLI as IDM’s multi-cloud-ready command line interface. While our first goal is to simplify initial deployment and upgrades, our plans for IDMCLI encompasses the full gamut of capabilities to orchestrate IDM deployments across multiple clouds and perform lift-and-shift, multi-data-center setups and moving artifacts between different instances to name a few.
Stay tuned to this blog series for future updates, and join us at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco next week where we’ll share more on Oracle’s IAM strategy, roadmap and demos of multi-cloud capabilities.