Oracle Fusion Middleware provisioning is always a critical prerequisite which will substantially influence the success or failure of our development projects. Those of us who have spent many years working with this toolset in its many versions, should know for sure what a distressful experience it is to work with sloppily or incorrectly provisioned environments.
Provisioning can also consume a lot of our precious time, whether it is performed locally or in controlled environments belonging to our organization / customer. As the components have evolved, setup options have also become increasingly complex and diverse (although maybe friendlier from a UI perspective), and even though we may have mastered this craft and are capable of producing a nice and shiny configuration, replicating this consistently and for multiple environments where we can expect high variance regarding product versions, particular requirements, limitations and criticality levels, is without any doubt a very challenging and potentially error-prone endeavor. Add dependencies, intangibles and deadlines to the mix and this can become as complicated as any other project task.
Nevertheless, for the time being and with all the tools at our disposal, this provisioning processes can be easily streamlined and automated, so we can stop the suffering while also learning some really exciting stuff and providing value to our organization / customer.
Automated provisioning: what are we looking for?
This “value” we’ve mentioned may represent lots of things when talking about an optimized provisioning cycle, for example:
- Agility / Speed: which will also translate into developer productivity, time to market and enhanced DR / scaling capabilities.
- Consistency / Standardization: so we can focus mostly on resolving business-oriented challenges rather than tripping up with environment-related issues.
- Change management: being able to evolve our environments by patching, upgrading and fine tuning in an orderly fashion, and without the fear of it collapsing like a house of cards at the minimum alteration.
- Competency building: so your team will be able to learn, perform and improve well-delimited and highly repeteable tasks rather than playing “heroball” (where everyone and everything ends up depending on a single engineer’s prowess and availability, sound familiar?)
So, which options do we have?
There are so many, but let’s talk about some of them and provide some examples and references. For instance, we will always have the good old config wizard: Read the complete article here.
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