1 Solution Overview and Architecture

The chapter provides an overview of Oracle Communications Digital Business Experience deployed in a cloud native environment.

You can deploy the solution on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and in other cloud native environments as well. When deployed on OCI, the cloud native solution uses OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE).

About the Solution

Digital Business Experience is a pre-integrated, end-to-end, digital business support system (BSS) for managing experiences and revenue at every stage of your journey. The solution enables you to:
  • Use Launch to intuitively design multi-dimensional offers faster with an intelligence-enabled, GUI-based enterprise product catalog.
  • Use Siebel CRM to capture customer and partner orders across assisted and unassisted channels.
  • Capture, validate, and deliver orders across channels faster using Order and Service Management (OSM) to dynamically orchestrate the order fulfillment of both subscriber orders and service orders.
  • Use Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) with Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) and Offline Mediation Controller (OCOMC) to mediate, charge and bill for multi-generational communications services (2G-5G mobile, fixed, satellite) at scale.
  • Use Siebel CRM to provide intelligent, personalized, and proactive subscriber care across traditional, digital, assisted, and unassisted channels.

Oracle Application Integration Architecture (Oracle AIA) is the solution’s integration framework that provides pre-built integrations and process flows between Siebel, OSM, and BRM using standard integration patterns, business processes, orchestration logic, and common objects and services to connect Oracle applications.

Digital Business Experience Architecture

This section describes and illustrates the deployment architecture and the deployment environment of the solution.

Figure 1-1 illustrates a functional deployment view of the solution within a single OCI region, showing the use of Oracle RAC as the underpinning data tier with container databases for AIA, OSM, BRM, ECE, and Siebel CRM.

Figure 1-1 Digital Business Experience Functional Architecture


Description of Figure 1-1 follows
Description of "Figure 1-1 Digital Business Experience Functional Architecture"

Note:

The above diagram is a functional representation of the Digital Business Experience architecture and does not include infrastructure components such as load balancers, firewalls, gateways and OCI services for clarity.
In the above conceptual reference architecture, the solution is deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). The solution applications have dedicated clusters.

You can use this architectural blueprint as a starting point for an end-to-end Cash to Care communications application solution that leverages the benefits of OCI. What the actual deployment architecture looks like for your deployment would be dependent on your needs and may differ from this architecture.

Note:

While the conceptual reference architecture above shows the Digital Business Experience Solution deployed on OCI, you can deploy the solution on OCNE, CNCF, and other cloud environments as well.

The Oracle RAC database is privately accessible from the Kubernetes worker nodes. You can use Oracle Base Database Service or the Exadata Cloud Service. This architecture depicts a typical approach to distribute the solution applications across Container Databases (CDBs). For more information about the latest supported database versions, refer to the compatibility matrix of each application.

Oracle Data Guard or Active Data Guard can be used for replication to standby databases.

A bastion host can be configured in a public subnet to allow access to the solution's worker nodes from your network. For example, this can be done using SSH. The web clients for Siebel, BRM and OSM and external integrations connect to load balancers through the Internet gateway. Additional security rule enforcement can be provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Web Application Firewall (WAF) for Internet traffic.

You can use an ingress controller behind an external load balancer to expose solution services outside of the Kubernetes cluster and use that to communicate with the solution application components. The ingress controller monitors the ingress objects and acts on the configuration embedded in these objects to expose HTTP and T3 services to the external network. The load balancer provides a highly reliable, single-point access into the services exposed by the Kubernetes cluster.

Database backups can use the Object Storage Service, and block storage is required for the worker node OS boot volumes and root filesystems. OKE Persistent Volumes (PVs) can use NFS-based persistence for shared storage. Block volumes can be used for all PVs that do not require shared storage.

Note:

You should share an external public load balancer with multiple backends across the solution component applications.

Considerations for Deploying the Solution

You need to consider the following for deploying the solution:
  • Detailed deployment architecture and performance: Actual production deployment architectures and solution sizing will vary depending on many factors, which should be discussed with Oracle or your implementation partner prior to and during the deployment project design phase.
  • Availability and resiliency: For simplicity, this architecture depicts a single availability domain. Advanced Kubernetes features (such as pod anti-affinity) enable deployments on OCI regions with multiple availability domains to maximize availability. In addition, deployments can be split across regions for geographic redundancy and disaster recovery scenarios. In such models, data replication across RAC instances can be provided using Active Data Guard. The above reference architecture does not consider individual application availability scenarios and these must be factored into your production deployment architecture.