Currently the Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) only comes as "customer managed". Among others this means that you as a customer have access to management consoles. It also means that you determine when to apply patches, as Oracle does not do that for you. The following describes how easy that is.
Oracle Cloud solutions can come in two flavors: Oracle Managed and Customer Managed. The first means that maintenance, including patching is done by Oracle. You don't have to ask for nor to initiate it as it all happens "automatically", typically during non-business hours (like Friday evening). It also means that you don't have any control over it. Now that probably is exactly what you want. However, in case of OIC that currently only comes as Customer Managed. This means that you have access to the Weblogic Service Console and the Fusion Middleware Console (although not with all the features that you for example would have with the on-premise version of the BPM Suite). I expect these consoles not to be available in the Oracle Managed flavor to come soon.
Another difference will be the way it is provisioned. With the Customer Managed flavor you have to provision a Storage Cloud yourself, and - depending on the type of template you use - also the Database Cloud.
With Oracle Managed I expect this to happen in one blow but that is yet to be seen. With Customer Managed you also have to think about how to configure the Stack that you want to use. A Stack is based on a Stack Template, which specifies the amount of nodes, OCPU's, memory, database version and edition of a node (and a few other things). A Stack is a provisioned instance of a template. After provisioning you cannot change the instance or use another template. However you can provision more instances based on the same stack. Another thing to point out is that with the Customer Managed flavor you need to indicate if and how you want it to be backed up.
Apart from some complexity but also flexibility that comes with determining your Stack Template, after provisioning there is little difference with the Oracle managed flavor. You can use it the same way, and if you have it configured to automatically do backups you don't have to think about that either. You do have to keep a keen eye on patches that may have become available, though.
If a patch is available, that will be shown on the Service Console:
You can start patching by clicking the link, which brings you to the Patch tab. In my case this gives a warning that I have no backup configured. It is a trial-only instance so I did not bother to do so. For a Production instance you should have done that (obviously). I don't know if I can still change that for my instance, but I don't think so. On the right-hand side there is a menu with two options: Precheck and Patch.
With the Precheck option you can let OIC verify if your instance is ready to apply the patch to. In my case it is.
With the Patch option from the menu you initiate the actual patching. In my case the patch can be done rolling what means with the instance up-and-running. As a matter of fact, the patch cannot be applied with one or more instances being shut down.
There also was a patch for the DB instance available, which required a restart. I could only apply that after shutting down the OIC instance, but that is indicated clearly.
Just for the fun of it I did the precheck of the patch after applying it. It failed, what I expected because it was already applied. The results were not very clear though.
Oracle Cloud solutions can come in two flavors: Oracle Managed and Customer Managed. The first means that maintenance, including patching is done by Oracle. You don't have to ask for nor to initiate it as it all happens "automatically", typically during non-business hours (like Friday evening). It also means that you don't have any control over it. Now that probably is exactly what you want. However, in case of OIC that currently only comes as Customer Managed. This means that you have access to the Weblogic Service Console and the Fusion Middleware Console (although not with all the features that you for example would have with the on-premise version of the BPM Suite). I expect these consoles not to be available in the Oracle Managed flavor to come soon.
Another difference will be the way it is provisioned. With the Customer Managed flavor you have to provision a Storage Cloud yourself, and - depending on the type of template you use - also the Database Cloud.
With Oracle Managed I expect this to happen in one blow but that is yet to be seen. With Customer Managed you also have to think about how to configure the Stack that you want to use. A Stack is based on a Stack Template, which specifies the amount of nodes, OCPU's, memory, database version and edition of a node (and a few other things). A Stack is a provisioned instance of a template. After provisioning you cannot change the instance or use another template. However you can provision more instances based on the same stack. Another thing to point out is that with the Customer Managed flavor you need to indicate if and how you want it to be backed up.
Apart from some complexity but also flexibility that comes with determining your Stack Template, after provisioning there is little difference with the Oracle managed flavor. You can use it the same way, and if you have it configured to automatically do backups you don't have to think about that either. You do have to keep a keen eye on patches that may have become available, though.
If a patch is available, that will be shown on the Service Console:
You can start patching by clicking the link, which brings you to the Patch tab. In my case this gives a warning that I have no backup configured. It is a trial-only instance so I did not bother to do so. For a Production instance you should have done that (obviously). I don't know if I can still change that for my instance, but I don't think so. On the right-hand side there is a menu with two options: Precheck and Patch.
With the Precheck option you can let OIC verify if your instance is ready to apply the patch to. In my case it is.
With the Patch option from the menu you initiate the actual patching. In my case the patch can be done rolling what means with the instance up-and-running. As a matter of fact, the patch cannot be applied with one or more instances being shut down.
Just for the fun of it I did the precheck of the patch after applying it. It failed, what I expected because it was already applied. The results were not very clear though.
