Set Up the Infrastructure to Deploy Oracle Modern Risk and Finance Applications

Oracle’s suite of Modern Risk and Finance applications enable you to proactively manage compliance, risk, treasury, finance, and the front office. They offer a unified platform based on a common data model that combines regulatory, compliance, risk, balance sheet management, and customer data to help you focus on profitability.

Deploy Oracle Modern Risk and Finance applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and realize the following business benefits:
  • Move your infrastructure to the cloud with minimal-to-zero need to change your application architecture.
  • Lower the total cost of ownership by reducing over-provisioning and moving from fixed to variable costs.
  • Reduce the risk of interruptions to business operations, and increase your responsiveness and customer satisfaction.

Architecture

This reference architecture shows the infrastructure required to deploy Oracle Modern Risk and Finance applications in the cloud.

The middleware tier, application tier, and database tier are in separate private subnets, which can be accessed through a bastion host. External access to the applications is through a public load balancer. Every tier has redundant resources distributed in different fault domains, ensuring a highly available application environment across the stack.

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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).

  • Availability domain

    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.

  • 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.

  • Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnet

    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.

  • Load balancer

    The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing service provides automated traffic distribution from one entry point to multiple application servers in the backend. The load balancer provides a front end to the application servers, isolating and preventing unnecessary or unauthorized access to the internal layers.

    When you create the application layer in cluster mode, you can configure the load balancer to distribute traffic across the servers in your Oracle WebLogic Server domain.

  • Bastion host

    The bastion host is a compute instance that serves as a secure, controlled entry point to the topology from outside the cloud. The bastion host is provisioned typically in a demilitarized zone (DMZ). It enables you to protect sensitive resources by placing them in private networks that can't be accessed directly from outside the cloud. The topology has a single, known entry point that you can monitor and audit regularly. So, you can avoid exposing the more sensitive components of the topology without compromising access to them.

  • Application tier

    The Oracle Financial Accounting Analyzer server is the node that hosts the product binaries, multi-threaded services for metadata management, and batch-processing frameworks.

  • Middleware tier
    The middleware tier contains the following components:
    • Oracle WebLogic Server
    • Oracle Data Integrator: Required only if using Oracle Financial Services Data Integration Hub
  • Database tier
    The database (DB) system is an Oracle database with up to three pluggable databases (PDBs) for the following components:
    • Configuration schema and application schema
    • Oracle Analytics: Required if you want to deploy the repository for Oracle Analytics in the same database
    • Oracle OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) and Oracle Hyperion Essbase: Required only for deployments that use the OLAP feature of Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications

    You can either install Oracle Database on compute instances, or provision Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Database systems as shown in the architecture. Use the high-performance edition.

  • NAT gateway

    The NAT gateway enables private resources in a VCN to access hosts on the internet, without exposing those resources to incoming internet connections.

  • Internet gateway

    The internet gateway allows traffic between the public subnets in a VCN and the public internet.

Recommendations

Your requirements might differ from the architecture described here. Use the following recommendations as a starting point.

  • VCN

    When you create a VCN, determine the number of CIDR blocks required and the size of each block based on the number of resources that you plan to attach to subnets in the VCN. Use CIDR blocks that are within the standard private IP address space.

    Select CIDR blocks that don't overlap with any other network (in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, your on-premises data center, or another cloud provider) to which you intend to set up private connections.

    After you create a VCN, you can change, add, and remove its CIDR blocks.

    When you design the subnets, consider your traffic flow and security requirements. Attach all the resources within a specific tier or role to the same subnet, which can serve as a security boundary.

    Use regional subnets.

  • Load balancer

    The smallest shape for the load balancer is 100 Mbps. Depending on the number of simultaneous connections needed and the throughput, you can use larger shapes. We recommend that you use DNS names, because the load balancer’s IP address can’t be reserved.

  • Compute instances

    This architecture uses a single compute instance in each fault domain. But depending on your workload, you can choose to deploy the components of the application on different compute instances.

  • DB systems

    For a small deployment, a single DB instance with two OCPUs is sufficient. This architecture uses a deployment with two DB systems, one of which is a standby.

  • Storage

    The compute instances in this architecture use regular block storage; no extra performance is required.

  • Network connectivity

    To enable your administrators to manage the environment, you can connect the cloud topology to your existing on-premises infrastructure by using site-to-site IPSec VPN connections or dedicated FastConnect circuits.

    If the cloud topology needs to be segregated from the on-premises infrastructure, you can deploy a bastion host to secure management access to the resources in the private subnets.

Considerations

  • Performance

    You can scale the performance of the architecture as needed. You can use larger shapes and add more instances to redistribute the load.

  • Security

    Except for the bastion host (if present) and load balancers, all the components should be placed in private subnets.

  • Availability

    In this architecture, redundant resources are provisioned in each layer, ensuring high availability. You can change the architecture to distribute resources across multiple regions. For added data protection, you can also use the database backup and volume backup features of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

  • Cost

    You can adjust the compute instances and database systems to use larger shapes when the load increases and shrink to smaller shapes when the load reduces.

Change Log

This log lists significant changes: