Oracle is unveiling its weblogic 12c release. Please register for the anouncement and details provided by the product management team here. Optimizations during runtime of your enterprise fusion middleware applications, leveraging of JEE 6 Active GridLink for RAC, Traffic Directory and Assembly Builder appear to be the focus.
With 12c release enterprise applications appear to be more cloud deployment ready with close tie in of your on-premise deployments with oracle-exalogic-weblogic cloud runtimes. Some components that are key to the upcoming architecture are:
Oracle Traffic Director - This is a load balancer traditionally speaking similar to BIG-IP in some sense that reroutes traffic to underlying cluster and does SSL encryption in a high performing way. However Oracle is tying this technology with interfacing with Oracle VM as an appliance with 40GBps infiniband connections. Does your enterprise require this kind of power for managing your traffic. The key here is that these days traffic is not external, relatively lightweight when it comes to payload. Most internal operations are not made to run on high available clusters. However, enterprise are moving this way slowly. In all such cases you would need all the bandwidth that you could get for running internal data intensive, service intensive (SOA for example) operation.
Active GridLink - Serious enterprise application developers know how badly applications need a highly available database for a successful OLAP/OLTP operation to run that meets an SLA. Traditionally, weblogic clusters run your enterprise applications that link to Oracle DB RAC solution with multi data source with XA support for example. GridLink data source manages connection internally and guards applications from losing connections when there is a controlled shutdown of RAC instances is being performed. In such scenarios the connections are directed to the least loaded database server followed by a re-balancing of connection when the new node is added to teh cluster.
Assembly Builder - Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder is designed to help organizations quickly create and configure entire multi-tier application topologies and provision them onto virtualized resources. It enables IT organizations to take multi-tier enterprise applications—for example, a web server, application server, and database—and package them into self-contained, single-purpose virtual machines called software appliances. Going further, Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder structures the process of combining these appliances into cohesive, reusable units known as assemblies. It makes the necessary connections between these appliances and then deploys the entire assembly—which comprises the complete multi-tier application—as a single unit. When that assembly is deployed, the components are configured automatically.
Let's wait to listen to Oracle for these features, their licensing aspects and their rollout into other fusion middleware suite of applications. I will follow up with more runtime implementation details as i find time.
