The new version of Oracle Visual Builder Studio adds support for automating continuous deployment of Integrations created in Oracle Integration from one instance to another. This can help teams easily promote changes to integrations from their development instance to their test and production instances. In this blog we'll show you how to achieve this.
Oracle Integration is a cloud service that allows you to integrate data from multiple sources and create data APIs for other apps to consume. For example, many of the customers who are developing user interfaces with Oracle Visual Builder rely on Oracle Integration to get the data shown in the UI. Oracle Integration has adapters that can help you easily connect and extract data from multiple systems.
Oracle Integration provides a web-based interface where developers visually create integrations and manage versions of those integrations. For customers who are looking to automate the process of migrating integrations between instances (such as from dev to prod) – Oracle Visual Builder provides an easy-to-use solution that simplify export and import of integrations.
Automating Integration CI/CD
We added specific Oracle integration functionality into Visual Builder Studio in both the Environments and Build areas. In the environments section you can define multiple environments and map them to integration cloud instances. We can scan your tenancy for instances, and you can also provide a pointer to other instances in other cloud tenancies.
Once you have your environments defined, you can start to leverage the dedicated build steps we added. Under the Oracle Integration menu you'll find build steps to export and to import integrations. In both steps you'll be pointing to an environment.
In the Export Integration step you'll provide the name of an integration and the specific version you wan to export. A search dialog will help find this info by querying your integration instance for a list of the integrations currently deployed there. Note that in the version of the integration field you can use a build job parameter – which will allow you to reuse the step across multiple versions of the integration.
After the export step, you'll want to use the archive artifact after-build action to store the generated iar file for later use.
The import integration step will pick up an iar file you stored in the export job. Set this up in the before-build section using a copy artifact action. Next, the import step will import it to the environment you'll specify. You can also specify whether you want to activate the integration after a successful import.
In the demo video below you can see how we automate the process of picking up a new version of an integration we built in our dev environment and deploying it on another server.
Update December 2021 – The new release of Visual Builder Studio added support for export and import of integration packages – this allows you to automate the CI/CD for multiplie integrations in one step.
Update February 2023 – The list of build steps for Oracle Integration keeps growing. The new release adds the ability to automate lookups and connections CI/CD with new built-in steps, as well as activate integration.
To learn more about the build steps see our documentation for those.
Beyond leveraging the CI/CD pipelines to automate the package and deploy parts of the DevOps cycle for Integrations, teams can also leverage other functionality of VB Studio to improve their DevOps process. For example, track to-do's with the issue tracking system, monitor development process with the Agile and Sprint dashboards, and share information through the wiki.
Visual Builder Studio provides a great platform to expand your DevOps automation platform to include Integrations too.