Good SOA Pipeline Plumbing by Gregory Hughlett

Starting Up

The arrival of the Jenkins Pipeline feature coincided with the the addition of Maven in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c release.  Jenkins pipelines now easily leverage Maven phases and goals for Fusion Middleware application deployments, including SOA/BPM composite applications and Service Bus projects.  This is the first in a series of blogs that will present three deployment workflows (pipelines) implemented in Jenkins for Oracle SOA projects.  The workflows will utilize Git source control, Git Flow branching methodology and scripts.  It also assumes the use of a managed Maven repository where application and FMW Maven artifacts are centralized.  Although the blogs primarily address SOA, there will be discussions about Metadata Services (MDS) and Service Bus (OSB) deployments.     

Although the approach defined here in Jenkins is leverages open source tools organizations should weigh the approach outlined here to the benefits (e.g. support and upgrades) that a commercial product brings to the table, like MyST from Rubicon Red.  MyST provides both platform provisioning and application release management tools that enable you to move the associated WebLogic artifacts (like data sources, queues, topics) when the application is promoted to higher environments.  Both are versioned nicely in MyST and easily migrated in the MyST release management dashboard. 

Jenkins however is the most widely adopted open source build server available, highly scalable, with a very large library of plugins to accomplish virtually any build task.  Jenkins provides a way to automate the tasks associated with building and deploying a application component using the Groovy language that leverages an extensive plugin library exposed through Java, referred to as a "pipeline".   The pipeline provides a graphical view of the deployment, as a series of stages, e.g. "Checkout", "Package", "Deploy", "Test".   Additionally there are manual gateways that can be implemented in a pipeline that only certain groups or users can performed, in the form of role-based assignments. Read the complete article here.

PaaS Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle PaaS become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki

Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress