Demystifying OIC, OCI and Oracle SOA CS

What is OIC (Oracle integration cloud), OCI (Oracle cloud infrastructure), and SOA cloud service and how they are different? - This has been a topic of discussion and debate for quite some time, especially now when SOA cloud service is gaining a little bit of momentum. People often are unclear on what these services are and how they are different. There is also ambiguity on when to use what. There are blogs and articles around but here I want to share my experience and learning. I request all the readers of this post to share your experience in the comments section and share if you agree, disagree with the findings.

OIC

OIC is a lightweight fully managed service for integrations from Oracle, in other words, it's a PaaS where the platform is actually allowing you to build integrations on-prem to cloud or cloud to cloud. The platform otherwise is not available as a product in the market and solely meant for Oracle cloud. OIC is ideal for lightweight integrations where orchestration is not very complex, transactions or volume is not huge and the requirement is easy to be fulfilled by the pre-defined integration patterns provided in the service.

OIC has 3 components ICS which is a kind of router and enables design monitor and manage the connection. PCS (process cloud service) is similar to BPM mainly used for workflows. And Visual builder service is similar to an IDE with which one can develop integration visually. OIC has close to 60 different adapters for both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. The list can be seen from the image below -

OCI 

OCI is a public cloud service with a plethora of services available to host, monitor, and manage your application. It also has some advanced services on AI, machine learning, blockchain, big data, analytics. Consider it as Oracle version of public providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. In reality, OCI was introduced to compete with these public vendors and boost Oracle's presence in the cloud market. It has a pay per usage pricing model for IaaS and PaaS offering and also supports BYOL.

In essence its not a dedicated integration platform though it has service available for integrations, connecting SaaS application or cloud-to-on-prem systems. If you are looking only for an integration platform than better to explore other Oracle integration services.

SOA Cloud Service

SOA cloud service is an iPaaS (Integration PaaS) offering by Oracle. It is essentially an Oracle SOA components installed on infrastructure managed by Oracle. The EM console, WebLogic admin console, and other consoles that you see on on-prem installation are available here as well. Also for development purposes usual, JDeveloper needs to be used which can connect to SOA cloud service for deployment.

Provisioning is really easy with cloud service and its just a matter of few clicks. This is the best part as setting up the environment is a time consuming cumbersome task especially a production environment. Another added advantage that I see is you will be relieved with patching the instance which is released every quarter. Licensing on the SOA cloud is a bit different. There are 2 options, either directly purchase a license and bring it or get a monthly subscription.

Few more benefits that I see are -

• Easy migration of existing code from on-prem to cloud as the underlying software remains the same.
• Scaling is really simple so you can focus on integrations
• Backups are automatics and with minimum configurations (hourly/daily) and so is the recovery
• Getaway with a subscription when not needed

So to conclude, OIC seems to be more fit for simple with low to medium volume wherein cloud services and APIs need to be integrated with an on-premise system. However, if the requirement enlists large file processing, with complex enrichment and orchestration probably Oracle SOA CS can cater to it in the best way.