Mutual Materials: Migration of On-Premises Business-Critical Applications to Oracle Cloud
After struggling to scale its masonry and hardscape business across 11 manufacturing sites, two mining sites, and 18 locations throughout the Pacific Northwest, Seattle-based Mutual Materials decided to migrate its on-premises business-critical applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
To help with its cloud migration, Mutual Materials partnered with Dallas-based technology consulting company, Doyensys, an Oracle partner that specializes in application and database deployments, migrations, and managed services.
To set up the environment on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Doyensys helped Mutual Materials to:
- Replicate the on-premises Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Database deployments on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- Implement multiple failover scenarios
- Provide high availability and scale with traffic fluctuations
- Tighten their overall security posture
Architecture
The reference architecture diagram shows Mutual Materials' production environment on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
To help Mutual Materials design a segregated environment for production workloads, development and test environments, and disaster recovery, Doyensys chose a region with multiple availability domains, which included Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's virtual cloud network (VCN), compute shapes, public and private load balancers, block volumes, Oracle Data Guard, identity and access management, and audit logs.
Because Mutual Materials needed to segregate different environments, Doyensys created three subnets for the production environment (one for applications, one for databases, and one for the load balancers), and created a separate set of subnets for non-production environments.
Eliminating service interruptions for Mutual Materials' core applications and databases was critical and prompted Doyensys to run those on separate virtual machines (VMs), with separate block volume storage, replicated in different fault domains. Using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volumes service, Mutual Materials was able to expand (or contract) the size of its block volumes based on seasonal business cycles. To increase its security posture, Mutual Materials implemented Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) service and restricted access to its applications through public and private load balancers.
The integration between Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Sales, and Oracle Transportation Management Cloud Service software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications was secured, using a public URL, and the POST method on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing. For their database instances, Mutual Materials used Oracle Data Guard to provide failover and disaster recovery capabilities.
The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture.
The architecture has the following components:
- Region
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).
All the resources in this architecture are deployed in a single region.
- Availability domains
Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain is unlikely to affect the other availability domains in the region.
All the resources in this architecture are deployed in a single availability domain.
- Fault domain
A fault domain is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain. Each availability domain has three fault domains with independent power and hardware. When you distribute resources across multiple fault domains, your applications can tolerate physical server failure, system maintenance, and power failures inside a fault domain.
- Compartment
Compartments are cross-region logical partitions within an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy. Use compartments to organize your resources in Oracle Cloud, control access to the resources, and set usage quotas. To control access to the resources in a given compartment, you define policies that specify who can access the resources and what actions they can perform.
- Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnets
A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.
- Identity and access management (IAM)
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to control who can access your resources in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the operations that they can perform on those resources.
- Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)
The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.
- Internet gateway
The internet gateway allows traffic between the public subnets in a VCN and the public internet.
- Load balancer
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing service provides automated traffic distribution from a single entry point to multiple servers in the back end.
This architecture includes a public load balancer.
- Block volume
With block storage volumes, you can create, attach, connect, and move storage volumes, and change volume performance to meet your storage, performance, and application requirements. After you attach and connect a volume to an instance, you can use the volume like a regular hard drive. You can also disconnect a volume and attach it to another instance without losing data.
- Data Guard
Oracle Data Guard provides a comprehensive set of services that create, maintain, manage, and monitor one or more standby databases to enable production Oracle databases to remain available without interruption. Oracle Data Guard maintains these standby databases as copies of the production database. Then, if the production database becomes unavailable because of a planned or an unplanned outage, Oracle Data Guard can switch any standby database to the production role, minimizing the downtime associated with the outage.
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