A few weeks ago I was made aware of a few announcements, which I think makes sense and that I want to pass on to my followers, sauced with a bit of my own perspective.

Containerized SOA

Last year I had made myself familar with the Oracle Weblogic Kubernetes Operator. See for instance my Cheat Sheet Serie. I also had the honour to talk about it during the Tech Summit at OUK in december '19. Weblogic under Kubernetes is apparently the way to go for Weblogic. And with that, also the Fusion Middleware Stack. However, until now only 'plain' Weblogic is supported under Kubernetes, on all Cloud platforms, as well as on your own on-premises Kubernetes platform.

It was no surprise that SOA Suite would follow, and in March there an early acces for SOA Suite on Kubernetes was announced.

In the announcement it is stated that Oracle will provide Container images for SOA Suite including OSB, that are also certified for deployment on production Kubernetes environments. Also documentation, support files, deployment scripts and samples.

Later on other components will be certified. This is good news, because it will allow SOA Suite be run in co-existence with cloud native applications and be part of a more heterogenous application platform. To me this makes sense. It makes High Availability and Disaster Recovery easier, but although the application landscape will be diverse and heterogenous, this makes the maintenance, install, deploy and upgrade of FMW within that landscape more uniformly aligned with other application compents like web applications, possible microservices, etc.

Paid Market Place offering

Another announcment I got recently is about the release of  a "Paid" listing of Oracle SOA Suite for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure" on the Oracle Marketplace. There was already a Bring Your Own Licence offering, that you could bring in to use your universal cloud credits to host your SOA Suite instance in the cloud. You could purchase a separate license, but now you can also use the Universal Cloud Credits  to have a paid, licensed instance of SOA Suite in the cloud, without the need to purchase a license.

And so there are two new offerings in the market place:

• Oracle SOA Suite on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (PAID)
• Oracle SOA Suite with B2B EDI Adapter on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (PAID)

These offerings include:

• SOA with Service Bus & B2B Cluster, with additional leverage of the B2B EDI Adapter.
• MFT Cluster
• BAM

This will provide better options for deploying SOA Suite on OCI, to:

• Provision SOA instances using OCI
• Manage instances using OCI
• Scale up/down/in/out using OCI
• Backup/restore using OCI.

Oracle's focus on delivering SOA Suite from the Market place. It is expected that current SOA Cloud Service customers will migrate to this offering. The Marktet Place SOA Suite will be enhanced and improved with new capabilities and functions, that not necessarily will be added to the SOA CS.
Probably this will give Oracle a better and more uniform way to improve and deliver new versions of SOA Suite. It also makes sense in relationship to the SOA Suite on Containers announcement.

For new customers the Marketplace is the way to get SOA Suite. Existing customers can use the BYOL offering, but might need to move to the new offering when contract renewal might be opportune.

What about Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC)?

This is still Oracle's prime offering for integrations and process modelling. You should first look at OIC for new projects. Only if you're an existing SOA Suite customer and/or have specific requirements that drive the choice to SOA Suite and related components, then you should consider the Marketplace SOA Suite offering.

This makes the choices a bit clearer, I think.