Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) Interview Questions & Answers

Question 1. What Is Integration Cloud Service?

Answer :

Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) is a simple and powerful integration platform in the cloud to maximize the value of your investments in SaaS and on-premises applications. Oracle Integration Cloud Service is Oracle's integration platform as a service (iPaas) and includes an intuitive web based integration designer for point and click integration between applications, a rich monitoring dashboard that provides real-time insight into the transactions, all of it running on a mature runtime platform on Oracle Cloud. ICS will help customers accelerate their integration projects by pre-integrating with several SaaS Applications and will significantly shorten their time-to-market through a highly intuitive user interface and a large library of SaaS Adapters.

Question 2. What Cloud Services Are Prerequisites For Integration Cloud Service?

Answer :

There are no prerequisites for subscribing to any cloud services while subscribing to Integration Cloud Service.

Question 3. What Defines A Connection In Integration Cloud Service, And How Does It Tie Into The Pricing For The Service?

Answer :

A Connection identifies a unique Application endpoint that is accessed using Integration Cloud Service. For instance, a sandbox instance of Salesforce.com or your production instance of Oracle Sales Cloud are each considered individual connections. There is a minimum of 6 connections for non-metered ICS and a minimum of 2 connections per month for metered ICS. There is no maximum limit on the # of connections you can place in an order. After you place an order for a specific number of connections, you will be led to a UI wherein you can decide on the allocation of connections to one or more ICS instances. Each ICS instance can accommodate up to 10 connections.

For example: if you place an order for 20 connections, you would be able to allocate 10 to one instance and 10 to another instance. If you place an order for 7 connections, you could allocate 5 to one instance and 2 to another. You can process upto a a maximum of one hundred thousand (100,000) messages per connection per day, across all connections. If your ICS instance had 8 connections, you could process upto 800,000 messages per day across all connections. Since once ICS instance can be configured with a max of 10 connections, you can process upto 1 million messages across all connections per day on that instance. Note that the size of the message may not exceed 5 MB.

Question 4. What Use-cases Are Supported By Integration Cloud Service?

Answer :

Integration Cloud Service addresses literally all SaaS to SaaS and SaaS to On-premises integration use-cases including ranging from simple Customer data synchronization across applications, to more advanced integration flows for processing opportunities, quotes, orders etc. The integration patterns range from real-time synchronous message exchanges between 2 applications to publish/subscribe message exchanges between multiple applications. Depending on the application, ICS also enables submission of a batch of requests to process a set of data objects (such as Incidents, Accounts etc) in one single interaction. When operating in a hybrid model, the set of possibilities expand to even larger number of business use-cases.

Question 5. What Applications Can I Integrate With Integration Cloud Service?

Answer :

Integration Cloud Service provides rich and native connectivity to a wide variety of applications including but not limited to Salesforce.com, Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle HCM Cloud, RightNow, Eloqua, CPQ. This list will grow to a broad portfolio of Oracle and third party SaaS applications over the next few releases. However, you do not need an adapter to get your integrations off the ground. The product does support native Web Services – so any one of the 2300+ SaaS applications in the market today can be integrated with ICS. The same applies to on-premises Applications as well. Native rich adapters for on-premises applications such as E-Business Suite, S.P, Siebel, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft etc will also be available on ICS in future releases.

Question 6. Does Integration Cloud Service Run Only On Oracle Cloud?

Answer :

Yes. However we are working on a plan to deliver the same capability on-premises and in the private cloud.

Question 7. Can You Search For Transactions Processed In Integration Cloud Service And Track And Act On Errors?

Answer :

Yes – you can define tracking identifiers for each integration flow and use them to search and find executed transactions from the monitoring dashboard. The dashboard allows drill-down capabilities and insight into errors. Users can act on these errors by submitting or aborting those errors.

Question 8. Can Oracle Provide Consultants Who Can Help Design And Deliver Integrations On Integration Cloud Service?

Answer :

Yes. Oracle and its partner SIs can further accelerate your time to market by designing and providing pre-built solutions on the Integration Cloud Service Platform.

Question 9. Does Integration Cloud Service Require Downtime During Patching?

Answer :

During initial product releases it would require a planned down-time once every month for a short duration. The patching window would be announced in advance for your information. We are looking to alleviate this in a future release.

Question 10. Is There Additional Training Available For Integration Cloud Service?

Answer :

For someone who is looking to master the service and offering in a greater detail, or for someone who is very new to the integration space, we are planning to offer a full-service training from Oracle University.

Question 11. Can You Model Process Orchestrations Using Ics?

Answer :

Yes. This is on our roadmap. We have upcoming capabilities to build long running processes in the cloud. However, the use-cases will be tailored to ensure they do not bring in elements of complexity into the design experience. You can also integrate with an existing SOA BPEL based Web service built using SOA Suite on-premises or SOA Suite Cloud Service instead.

Question 12. What Are The Security Capabilities In Integration Cloud Service?

Answer :

There are several dimensions of security that Integration Cloud Service supports:

• Physical/Data center security: provided by Oracle Cloud Data Centers.
• ICS Product Security: ensuring that your ICS environment is secured from from external threats and also ensure security of any customer's data and metadata within ICS ecosystem.
• ICS capabilities to securely integrate with Oracle own SaaS apps on PC seamlessly.
• ICS capabilities to securely integrate with any third party Application (generic SOAP/REST API based interface).
• ICS capabilities to securely integrate with on-premises applications Together, ICS provides a highly secure environment for your enterprise in the Cloud.

Question 13. What Defines An Ipaas?

Answer :

As per Gartner, Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations.

Question 14. What Is Oracle Data Integration Platform Cloud?

Answer :

Data Integration Platform Cloud (DIPC) is an Oracle Cloud service that offers a single platform to connect to hundreds of on-premises and cloud data sources. From this platform you extract, load and transform (ELT) data entities of any shape and format, synchronize or replicate  selected data sources, integrate with big data technologies, perform data analytics and maintain data quality.

Question 15. What Use Cases Does Data Integration Platform Cloud Solve?

Answer :

The most relevant use cases are:

• Data warehouses, data integration and migrations (Standard edition).
• Big Data integration, data synchronization, zero downtime migration, real-time data warehouses and active-active data sources (Enterprise edition).
• Data profiling and validation, match and merge, creating glossaries, data lineage and metadata management (Governance edition).

Question 16. What Are The Benefits Of Using Oracle Data Integration Platform Cloud?

Answer :

You connect to many heterogeneous on-premises and cloud data sources from a single platform and do all sorts of integration on your data entities. Data in any shape and format can be loaded and transformed on this platform. Data integration and synchronization happen in real time. Data will not get lost and data sources are highly available, even with large volumes of data. You have a choice for the type and number of sources and targets for data replication. All your unstructured data is handled well and data from this platform can be streamed into big data technologies for further ingestion and analytics. Because this is an Oracle Cloud product, you can easily integrate other Oracle cloud and non-cloud products such as Storage, Database, Exadata and Big Data Cloud with it.

Question 17. How Is Patching Done For Cloud Service Instances?

Answer :

Whenever a patch for a service instances becomes available, a message appears next to its name in the Services page. Click the service name to go to the detail page and then click the Administration tile. The Administration page has a tab called patching. In this page, you'll find a list of all available patches. Each patch has a Precheck and a Patch menu option. First click Precheck to ensure that your service needs a patch. Then click Patch, to apply the patch to your service. Each patch also has a Readme file for your information.

Question 18. Does Data Integration Platform Cloud Support On-premises To On-premises Synchronization Without Moving Data Into The Cloud?

Answer :

Yes, starting with release 17.4.5 with the following caveats:

• An on-premises Data Integration Platform Cloud remote agent (only available for Linux) is required. You need to download and install the agent to the appropriate source/target locations.
• A VPN connection between the on-premises systems and Oracle Cloud is required.
• This is limited to Oracle to Oracle replication processes.
• The Data Integration Platform Cloud instance in Oracle Cloud has to be running at all times while the GoldenGate processes are running, otherwise you won’t be billed properly.

If your use case can be satisfied with all the conditions mentioned above, then you can create your Oracle GoldenGate artifacts — extract, data pump, and replicat, directly from within your on-premises Data Integration Platform Cloud remote agent installations and the data is routed accordingly. Connections must be defined within the Data Integration Platform Cloud Catalog for the replication source and targets.

Note:

The Data Integration Platform Cloud application in Oracle Cloud is not aware of these custom artifacts, as they are monitored outside of Data Integration Platform Cloud. Future releases will add support for monitoring these custom processes within Data Integration Platform Cloud.

Question 19. What Are Load Balancers For Cloud Services?

Answer :

Load balancers control the traffic to the applications that come with your service instances. They receive the client requests to the applications for a service and then, they distribute them among the VMs in a service instance. The overhead of encrypting and decrypting HTTPS traffic is also transferred to the load balancer. Load balancers can temporarily suspend traffic access to the service instance in order to perform routine maintenance. Each load balancer node is assigned a separate public IP address. 

Question 20. What Is The Prerequisite To Run A Workload In The Virtual Machine Of My Cloud Service Instance?

Answer :

Run your data integration workloads as the oracle user. Use the command sudo su - oracle after you log into the VM of your service.