In medium to large organizations what team or group typically support middle tier components like Oracle Application Servers?
(Unix Team, DBA Team, Or Application Development/Support Team)
In a client server application design the delineation of ownership between the server and the client is very clear. In the client server case the Unix Administrators manage the servers and the development support team manage and support the clients. (and the DBA's support/manage the database)
Recently at our shop the lines have become blurred; the introduction of an Oracle application Server (OAS) has popped up;
OAS seems to require a very unique set of skills but also show some similarity to the client server skills. (part Unix Admin, Part Dba, Part Application Developer/Client Support)
What have others done when confronted with this kind of challenge......??
Does a completely new team form that exclusively supports the Middle Tier??
Our It Group has 3 Unix Admins; 3 Application Support staff; 3 Dba's to give the perspective of the size of the teams....
There are a couple of different options, to my mind:
1) Roll it into the application development/support team as this is part of an application that isn't necessarily where only Admins are useful. There should be a separation between development and support to some extent as different tools may be used and some may have a stronger skill set for one over the other such as if one prefers investigating things then support may be a better fit.
2) Platform management team which is a separate group where there is a separation of the layers involved in the applications the company produces. I used to work for a company where the middle tier and back-end were managed by one team that was separate from the Applications group which seems appropriate if there is the plan of having that middle and back-end tiers become a platform for the company to pitch to other companies to use how they see fit in terms of making their own applications on top of this API.
I can see a logic in using either method depending on how one sees what the IT arm offers in a sense.
For large organizations, you generally eventually get to a point where there are dedicated teams to manage the middle tier web servers and application servers.
The problem for smaller organizations generally comes that when you first deploy the app servers, there may not be enough admin work to justify a separate person in that role, at which point you have to cobble together time from other teams. It's not particularly unusual for DBAs to manage the app server (particularly for Oracle DBAs managing Oracle Application Servers). It's also not particularly unusual for the Unix admins to manage the app server. Either way, though, some of the work will inevitably benefit from input from the other team.
IMHO there should be a single "Oracle" team, comprising DBA's, unix admins, application admins, and even a network person for big installations. There is really only one system, although it has multiple tiers and technologies. You do not want four teams all passing the buck round when a system fault occurs. Ask me how I know ;)
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I am new in Service Now platform, developing a custom app using the service portal and I am looking for some architectural advice from experts.
My storyline is my service is gonna serve different companies as per their requirements by easy codebase maintenance. for example, I am having a base app which has some concrete requirements that fit for all companies, but there will be some other features for company specific, like feature A for company A, feature B for company B and so on. So my initial plan was like classic software development that is to have a single codebase using git that will have multiple feature branches that will deploy to multiple instances. But sometimes some situation where I might need to merge the branches that is not possible now. My question here is there any alternative way to do that? Other possible scenarios here is should I go with a single instance with ACL based data separation? (but that not feels scalable to me cause the amount of the data will be huge after some time) or is that possible to apply regular SAAS architecture like multitenancy(single app with multiple databases) with some configuration wise feature separation?
Thanks in Advance.
I'm working on a project that is set up as multi-tenant, separate users, data stores, etc. However, as I look further into different scenarios, I see things that may not mix well with multi-tenancy, or at least as I understand it.
Tenants can be hierarchal
Company A
West Region
East Region
Company B
Campus A
Campus B
Company C
Tenants can provide resources to another resource
Company A creates a resource
Company A shares it with Company B with specified permissions
Company C shares a resource with Company B
Company B can now use resources provided by Company A and C
I'm not tied to multi-tenancy, but I want to make sure that whatever pattern I choose, I am following the best practices of the pattern.
Is hierarchal multi-tenancy defined well enough to actually attempt? I don't see much online about it, except for a proposed Open Stack project and a research paper in only 2014. I could potentially use hierarchal users instead, but there are, of course, other benefits to tenants.
Now given that I want tenants to be able to share resources, in any direction, maybe I don't need hierarchal tenants. Maybe a need a normal flat multi-tenant pattern with just an added layer of sharing. One tenant would share to another tenant or maybe a user in another tenant.
In the latter, each user seems like they become their own tenant, with their own data. It seems like it is more and more like a social network. in Facebook, I can share things to others, they can share things to me, there is no direct hierarchy, but brands will make pages that reflect the idea of a hierarchy, without actually having one. For instance, Microsoft has Microsoft, but also Xbox, Xbox Support 1, Xbox Support 7, Windows, Bing, etc.
So I've started here with a multi-tenant architecture in front of me and now I'm thing a business grade "social network" is what I really need.
Do either of those tracks make sense? Any thing you would have me change or consider?
In cloud computing, multi-tenancy (MT) is commonly accompanied by tenant isolation. If we take the Wikipedia definition, MT is independent of sharing.
In an MT architecture, one instance of a software serves multiple tenants (or groups of users). This is in contrast to multi-instance software in which multiple instances of a software serves multiple tenants.
The main benefit of the MT architecture is of cost - software updates can be done on the single instance to benefit all of the tenants. MT software provides a common base of functionality for tenants, but commonly have interfaces that allow each tenant to customize branding & workflows.
Your project looks to be MT with sharing capability. Let's assume each Company wants to be able to share access to some resources. The architecture then should have sufficient flexibility for the tenant to be able to control access to resources. The underlying frameworks should be fast, secure, and reliable, and auditable.
Since your focus is on sharing flexibility, it's important that the architecture supports letting tenants define access to resources the way you and they want - tenant to tenant, or tenant to some user.
In my opinion, I would consider starting with a "default-deny" architecture - one that doesn't share anything by default, and allow the tenants to setup rules for access to resources.
Short version: Multi-tenancy is generally independent of interactivity.
Apart from Technology support , what are all the business benefits for oracle web logic server. For example in area of security,support etc.
What are all the new features supported by weblogic ?
TL;DR:
Support is great when you open ticket with Oracle Support (Weblogic strictly).
Great admin/read-only user implementation. We authenticate to Windows Active Directory. Developers get read-only accounts, reduces churn for them to wait for ops to transfer logs and validate settings.
Dashboard useful out-of-box to do real-time monitoring without additional tools or installs. Easily accessed by any one who is authenticated to login. We could give it to our CIO if he wanted in about 3 minutes by adding him to the right authorized group in AD.
Easier to clone environments.
I haven't worked with OC4J but I believe Oracle's roadmap is picking Weblogic as their preferred Java application server. You can see it is the base technology for some of their other products, such as Oracle Service Bus, Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), and Oracle Line Planning.
I have opened 3 Oracle tickets in the past month. I was surprised at how fast they answered. For a Severity 3 ticket (medium), they usually have responded in 2-3 days. I can't say the same for their other services (over 2 weeks for a ticket on OEM).
Security is a pretty broad scope... so you'd have to be a little more specific on some of the topics of security.
One thing that is pretty awesome is the Dashboard. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14571_01/web.1111/e13714/dashboard.htm You can obviously add read-only monitor accounts so other users can get insight to the performance. We add developers to this so that they can validate any settings, or see performance whenever there is a production issue.
We used Microsoft Active Directory authentication in our Weblogic domains. People are not using the default weblogic administrator user so configuration changes are audited. When someone's account gets disabled when leaving the company, it disables their access to Weblogic similarly. You don't have to change the password.
Other useful settings I like in it is the ability to automatically archive config changes. Each time someone makes a config change, a backup is automatically created. This allows me to go fix something when developers break their environment without having to majorly reverse-engineer what they did.
I also like the fact that you can pack and unpack the domains. I've used it to move entire domains from staging to production with some minor changes... i.e. change all stg to prod variables. This should likewise make it easier to 'clone' environments when you want to build out a new one.
Although not related, I should mention Oracle Enterprise Manager. We are an Oracle shop because they seem to have given us a good deal on licencing. So we get to run Oracle Enterprise Manager, which is a tool slowly becoming more and more useful. The agent also reports how our RedHat Linux hosts are behaving, network input/output, CPU utilization, memory utilization, java heap stacks. We are going to move to defining groups within that has all the targets related to an application stack. This will give our operations team the insight to see where the bottleneck might be... the Oracle Weblogic web layer, network, Oracle Service Bus, or Oracle Database performance.
Supposedly, you can add jBoss, other JMX monitoring as well to OEM. It's on our to-do list for non-Weblogic instance. We're slowly rolling OEM out.
This is a discussion point I'd like to raise, regarding how folks position the administration of MQ. Is it seen as a resource/utility function, like networks, databases, or servers, or is it rather identified as being closely linked to applications, and therefore, integrated closely in application development/sustainment? Or rather, might it only be kept separate from applications, if there is enough demand for MQ admin activities in multiple projects/applications, so as to not be too aligned with anyone application?
I have seen it both ways.
The larger the organization, the demand for MQ services will be high and hence a separate team of MQ admins. They maintain the MQ network as well as work on various projects that involve MQ.
In small companies MQ is aligned with either infrastructure administration team or application support team especially the middleware support team.
From my point of view, MQ looks like a platform which integrate services and applications. It works like a factory that package the message, store them in a queue system and send them out to the services and applications, instead of connecting and directly exchanging information with each other.
If i have a multi-tenant asp.net MVC application, something like basecamp ,what's the suitable hosting plan for me, is it a "Shared Hosting" or "Dedicated Server" is best fit for me.
Some parameters for the project:
- Each tenant will have a different database.
- Each tenant will have its own sub-domain.
- Expected number of tenants in the first year for the product, about 1000 tenant.
So how can I manage the hosting part of this project ?
Am open for any suggestions even if they are not part of my question.
To decide which infrastructure best fits your application you need to take into account parameters like how "active" your tenants will be or how "heavy" your application is.
For example, a simple, read only application for 1000 user may fit a pretty small dedicated server. But a different system may need a couple of DB servers and 3 web servers in a load balanced configuration (a basecamp-like with 1000 users may need a configuration like that)
You should not underestimate this problem: I don't think that a single server would be powerfull enough, and when you have more than one server your sysadmin problems start to grow :)
Remember that another viable alternative is hosting your application in a cloud environment (ie: http://aws.amazon.com or Microsoft Azure). But sometimes going to the cloud need a different approach on application's architecture.
Also, remember to take into account consideration like the availability of your application (ie: what happens when the server goes down?)