Building a Scalable, Highly Available Oracle API Gateway 11g Infrastructure in a Cloud Environment by Marcelo Parisi

Introduction

One of the major challenges that companies face in adopting a cloud computing platform is the secure provisioning of services in the cloud. Oracle API Gateway (OAG) 11g can be a very powerful tool in this sense, since it focuses on service protection, with authentication mechanisms, message encryption, and security/policy functionalities.

In this article, we will see how to create a cloud-based OAG infrastructure, with high-availability and scalability support. Both high-availability and scalability operations will be covered here. We’ll be using virtual machines (VMs) and storage concepts, along with OAG and Oracle Traffic Director (OTD). While a physical load balancer will also be necessary, its configuration is beyond the scope of this article.

The service infrastructure—Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Service Bus or any other kind of service provider environment that needs to be exposed in a secure manner through the environment we’ll be building—will also not be covered in this article.

This article assumes a Network File System (NFS) v4 and Network Information Service/Lightweight Directory Service Protocol (NIS/LDAP) compliant environment. If you don’t support it, the article will indicate the changes so that you can run on a NFSv3 environment without NIS/LDAP.

There is no capacity planning or sizing work done on this article. The number of CPUs, memory and filesystem size are all just for demonstration purposes and should be revisited in a production environment.

OAG and OTD documentation should always be consulted. This document is not intended to replace any of the product’s official documentation.

Finally, please note that OTD is supported only in Exalogic environments.

Infrastructure Architecture

In this article, we’re going to build a brand new infrastructure from scratch to support this environment. We’ll consider two VMs for OTD and, initially, three VMs for OAG, one of them for administration purposes only. The environment infrastructure architecture will resemble the architecture in Figure 1, below:

As you can see, we have high availability on both the OTD layer and the OAG layer. Both layers are scalable either horizontally or vertically. This article discusses scalability only on the OAG layer.

We’re going to create five VMs—three for OAG, with Oracle Linux 5.6; two with Oracle Linux 6.6 for OTD. I suggest using VM Templates or cloning to make this task easier. The VMs’ configuration should resemble the table in Figure 2, below: Read the complete article here.

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