9 About Platform as a Service

About Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Enterprises today must deliver new services and constantly innovate to stay ahead of their competitors. However, enterprises face several challenges in delivering quality service on schedule. Provisioning infrastructure for new projects takes days and weeks, instead of hours. This severely limits enterprise agility. Users, such as Developers or QA Engineers, need rapid access to development platforms, without intervention by IT administrators.

Oracle Cloud Management Pack for Middleware offers all capabilities necessary for deploying and managing middleware-centric Platform as a Service (PaaS) clouds within the enterprise. PaaS enables enterprise users to acquire resources and deploy J2EE applications quickly, while focusing on application development, instead of infrastructure administration. Users can directly access applications without IT intervention and achieve massive enterprise agility.

Platform as a Service with Enterprise Manager

Enterprise Manager provides the most comprehensive solution for rolling out a middleware-centric PaaS Cloud for users in an enterprise. It allows users to build, deploy and manage the entire lifecyle of the cloud from a single console. The pre-integrated solution ensures that IT administrators can quickly deliver value to users, while retaining control of the environment. Oracle platforms ensure developers can leverage the features of the PaaS Cloud without having to learn new non-standard technologies, ensuring continuity of skills for the enterprise.

Enterprise Manager provides the following features:

• Self Service Provisioning of J2EE Applications: Enterprise Manager enables IT to deliver WebLogic-based application deployment environments as Cloud services. Administrators can define different types of service (based on sizing or other configuration characteristics of the WebLogic runtime) to meet their enterprise standards. The Self Service Portal can be used to request these services on demand, deploy applications to them, and manage the lifecycle of each of their service instances. Users can monitor their services instance and the J2EE applications deployed to them for performance and availability.

• Self Service Provisioning of Multi Tier Applications: Using the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, Enterprise Manager, allows IT to package complex, enterprise platforms and applications into Assemblies and deliver them as Cloud services. Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder allows administrators to quickly configure and provision entire multi-tier enterprise applications Cloud environments.

  Administrators can create different assemblies, each capturing enterprise best practices for deployment, and enable rapid self-service provisioning of these platforms. Developers can use the Self Service Portal to deploy these assemblies on demand, manage the lifecycle of these instances, as well as monitor the various tiers.

• Elastic Resource Provisioning: Enterprise Manager enables users to scale up or scale down resources attached to an application in an elastic fashion. For Java services, developers can dynamically scale up or down the number managed servers available within a WebLogic service by way of the Self Service Portal.

• Metering and Chargeback: Enterprise Manager provides tools to define detailed charge plans spanning different metrics collected for physical and virtual resources. Enterprise Manager supports metering for all of the resources necessary for an Oracle-based PaaS cloud, including hosts, virtual machines, database, and WebLogic Server instances. A hierarchy of cost centers can be created or imported from the LDAP for cost allocation and reporting aggregation.

• Consolidation Planner: IT administrators can use Consolidation Planner to run different scenarios for redistributing workloads onto existing systems or new environments, and determine if this will result in SLA violations. Based on these scenarios, an administrator can select the best approach for establishing the infrastructure to support the Cloud.

• Cloud Administration and Monitoring: Enterprise Manager provides end-to-end monitoring and diagnostic capabilities for identifying bottlenecks in the cloud infrastructure and for taking remedial actions against such bottlenecks. End User monitoring1 (real and synthetic), Business Transaction Management, Java and Database monitoring and Diagnostics2, and system monitoring agents are deployed into the cloud infrastructure and provide complete performance and availability monitoring of the business application, individual infrastructure, and the software components on which the application is deployed.