Build an Automated Order Management Solution Using Oracle Blockchain Platform
Manual order management can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Manufacturers often struggle with the constant back-and-forth communication exchange between suppliers and auditors having to confirm order status, deliveries, and quotes. The inventory counting process onsite for large remote factories or warehouse facilities involves time and resource-intensive steps, constraints, and is prone to errors.
This architecture uses the Oracle Blockchain Platform and Oracle Visual Builder to build an automated end-to-end order management solution that supports multiple suppliers. Oracle Blockchain Platform is a managed blockchain service for running smart contracts and maintaining a tamper-proof distributed ledger. Built on the open source Hyperledger Fabric, it simplifies the development of secure and verifiable applications that share immutable, trusted data with third parties such as suppliers and financial institutions. Create smart contracts for real-time business-to-business transactions, or validate matching purchase orders, invoices, and shipping information before payment. Oracle Visual Builder is used to build the order management application interface.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Blockchain Platform adapts to GDPR laws, which describe the right to delete data. No sensitive data is stored on-chain in the solution. After data is stored on-chain, it is immutable and unchangeable. If there are strong requirements to store sensitive data, data can be stored off-chain and easily deleted from databases.
This reference architecture provides the following features.- Build an automated solution that confirms orders, confirms deliveries, and improves overall operational reporting.
- Automate the end-to-end order process to prevent production downtime.
- Eliminate manual tasks and adjustments.
Architecture
This architecture shows a multi-region deployment in Frankfurt, Singapore, and Brazil (EMEA, America, and Asia). Regions are close to suppliers to reduce latency. The application is also deployed regionally, and the corresponding mechanism is extended to centralize the data.
The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture.
blockchain-order-automation.zip
An order portal to confirm orders and deliveries is created using Oracle Visual Builder. The portal allows suppliers to sign received orders, submit updates, or reject orders. Orders and emails are sent using a third-party on-premises instance. Oracle Integration Cloud Service and Oracle Visual Builder integrate order information as transactions in Oracle Blockchain Platform. Order data is then used by the Oracle Analytics Cloud to create dashboards. New signed orders are sent to auditors weekly.
The following diagram illustrates the logical flow of this 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).
- 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.
- Fault domains
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 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.
- 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.
- Analytics
Oracle Analytics Cloud is a scalable and secure public cloud service that empowers business analysts with modern, AI-powered, self-service analytics capabilities for data preparation, visualization, enterprise reporting, augmented analysis, and natural language processing and generation. With Oracle Analytics Cloud, you also get flexible service management capabilities, including fast setup, easy scaling and patching, and automated lifecycle management.
- Autonomous Transaction
Processing
Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing database service that is optimized for transaction processing workloads. You do not need to configure or manage any hardware, or install any software. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure handles creating the database, as well as backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.
- Cloud Guard
You can use Oracle Cloud Guard to monitor and maintain the security of your resources in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Cloud Guard uses detector recipes that you can define to examine your resources for security weaknesses and to monitor operators and users for risky activities. When any misconfiguration or insecure activity is detected, Cloud Guard recommends corrective actions and assists with taking those actions, based on responder recipes that you can define.
- 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.
- Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)
The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between VCNs in the same region, 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.
- Email Delivery
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Email Delivery is a highly scalable, cost effective, and reliable email delivery service for sending high-volume, application-generated emails for mission-critical marketing, notification, and transactional communications such as receipts, fraud detection alerts, multifactor identity verification, and password resets.
- 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.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the access control plane for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Cloud Applications. The IAM API and the user interface enable you to manage identity domains and the resources within the identity domain. Each OCI IAM identity domain represents a standalone identity and access management solution or a different user population.
- LoggingLogging is a highly scalable and fully managed service that provides access to the following types of logs from your resources in the cloud:
- Audit logs: Logs related to events emitted by the Audit service.
- Service logs: Logs emitted by individual services such as API Gateway, Events, Functions, Load Balancing, Object Storage, and VCN flow logs.
- Custom logs: Logs that contain diagnostic information from custom applications, other cloud providers, or an on-premises environment.
- Monitoring
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring service actively and passively monitors your cloud resources using metrics to monitor resources and alarms to notify you when these metrics meet alarm-specified triggers.
- Notifications
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Notifications service broadcasts messages to distributed components through a publish-subscribe pattern, delivering secure, highly reliable, low latency, and durable messages for applications hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
- Object storage
Object storage provides quick access to large amounts of structured and unstructured data of any content type, including database backups, analytic data, and rich content such as images and videos. You can safely and securely store and then retrieve data directly from the internet or from within the cloud platform. You can seamlessly scale storage without experiencing any degradation in performance or service reliability. Use standard storage for "hot" storage that you need to access quickly, immediately, and frequently. Use archive storage for "cold" storage that you retain for long periods of time and seldom or rarely access.
- Policy
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management policy specifies who can access which resources, and how. Access is granted at the group and compartment level, which means you can write a policy that gives a group a specific type of access within a specific compartment, or to the tenancy.
- Route table
Virtual route tables contain rules to route traffic from subnets to destinations outside a VCN, typically through gateways.
- Security list
For each subnet, you can create security rules that specify the source, destination, and type of traffic that must be allowed in and out of the subnet.
- Visual Builder Cloud Service
Oracle Visual Builder is a cloud-based software development Platform as a Service (PaaS) and a hosted environment for your application development infrastructure. It provides an open-source standards-based solution to develop, collaborate on, and deploy applications within Oracle Cloud. It also offers an integrated Visual development environment with agile collaborative development, version control, and continuous delivery automation. Enrich applications with engaging custom UI and it is an extendable platform through standard JavaScript, HTML, CSS and REST.
- Oracle Blockchain
Platform
Oracle Blockchain Platform is a managed blockchain service, which provides a tamper-proof distributed ledger to record issuance (minting) of NFTs, maintain NFT transaction history, and maintain infrastructure nodes to run smart contracts for NFT transactions. It is a preassembled, permissioned platform based on Hyperledger Fabric that can operate on its own, or as part of a network consisting of validating nodes (peers). These nodes update the ledger and respond to queries by running smart contract code—the business logic that runs on the blockchain.
External applications invoke transactions or run queries through client SDKs or REST API calls, which prompt selected peers to run smart contracts, such as the ERC-721 contract. Multiple peers endorse (digitally sign) the results, which are then verified and sent to the ordering service. After consensus is reached on the transaction order, transaction results are grouped into cryptographically secured, tamper-proof data blocks and sent to peer nodes to be validated and appended to the ledger.
With Oracle Blockchain Platform, you complete some simple instance creation steps, and then Oracle takes care of service management, patching, monitoring, and other service lifecycle tasks. Service administrators can use the Oracle Blockchain Platform web console or its REST APIs to configure the blockchain and monitor its operation.