1. Learn about deploying Oracle WebCenter Sites on OCI Kubernetes Engine
  2. Learn About Deploying Oracle WebCenter Sites on OCI Kubernetes Engine

Learn About Deploying Oracle WebCenter Sites on OCI Kubernetes Engine

Deploy and manage Oracle WebCenter Sites in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Kubernetes Engine (OKE) environment using Oracle WebLogic Server Kubernetes Operator.

Oracle WebCenter Sites deployed on OCI Kubernetes Engine use the open-source WebLogic Server Kubernetes Operator framework, which has several key features to assist you with deploying and managing Oracle WebCenter Sites in an OCI Kubernetes Engine environment.

  • Automating the setup and configuration of a Oracle WebCenter Sites environment across the cluster.
  • Working in cloud and on-premise solutions.
  • Scaling Oracle WebCenter Sites deployments to multiple nodes.
  • Upgrading with zero downtime.
  • Monitoring your applications health and logs in an interactive way.

Architecture

This architecture shows Oracle WebCenter Sites deployed in a Kubernetes cluster provisioned in Oracle Cloud by using OCI Kubernetes Engine.

This service makes it easy to create a Kubernetes cluster and provide the required services, such as a load balancer, block storage, and networking.

The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture.


Description of oracle-webcenter-sites-oci-kubernetes-engine.png follows
Description of the illustration oracle-webcenter-sites-oci-kubernetes-engine.png

oracle-webcenter-sites-oci-kubernetes-engine-oracle.zip

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 shouldn't 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 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 a single entry point to multiple servers in the back end.

  • File storage

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure File Storage provides a durable, scalable, secure, enterprise-grade network file system. You can connect to OCI File Storage from any bare metal, virtual machine, or container instance in a VCN. You can also access OCI File Storage from outside the VCN by using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect and IPSec VPN.

  • Kubernetes Engine

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Kubernetes Engine (OCI Kubernetes Engine or OKE) is a fully managed, scalable, and highly available service that you can use to deploy your containerized applications to the cloud. You specify the compute resources that your applications require, and Kubernetes Engine provisions them on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in an existing tenancy. OKE uses Kubernetes to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of hosts.

  • WebCenter Sites domain

    An Oracle WebCenter Sites domain is a group of applications such as Mobility Server, Content Server, Community Server, Gadget Server, and resources, and the configuration information necessary to run them. A domain includes one or more Oracle WebCenter Sites instances, which can be clustered, non-clustered, or a combination. A domain can include multiple clusters.

  • WebCenter Sites

    Oracle WebCenter Sites: enables marketers and business users to easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, and interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale.

    • Site Capture

      Oracle WebCenter Sites: Site Capture is a web application that integrates with Oracle WebCenter Sites through the Oracle WebCenter Sites: Web Experience Management (WEM) Framework to capture dynamically published websites for evaluation, compliance purposes, high availability requirements, and other types of scenarios.

    • Visitor Services

      Oracle WebCenter Sites: Visitor Services is a component that provides visitor profile storage, management, and targeting for Oracle WebCenter Sites. Visitor attributes from different sources are enriched with data available from other repositories and automatically linked through aggregate templates and a unique visitor ID.

    • Satellite Server

      Oracle WebCenter Sites: Satellite Server works with Oracle WebCenter Sites to provide the following benefits:

      • Caching: An additional layer of caching, supplementing the layer of caching that is provided by the Oracle WebCenter Sites cache.
      • Scalability: You can quickly and economically scale your Oracle WebCenter Sites system by adding remote installations of Satellite Server.
      • Improved performance: Satellite Server improves your website's performance by reducing the load on Oracle WebCenter Sites and moving content closer to the website visitors who will view it.
      • The ability to cache REST calls. For this reason you may wish to add a remote Satellite Server in front of a content management installation as well as a delivery installation.

Recommendations

Use the following recommendations as a starting point to <rest of sentence.> Your requirements might differ from the architecture described here.
  • 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.

  • Kubernetes Engine

    Although the operator supports any generic Kubernetes cluster, this architecture uses OCI Kubernetes Engine clusters. These clusters have five worker nodes spread across different physical hosts. The cluster shown has worker nodes spread across different physical hosts. You can create up to 1,000 nodes in a cluster. The worker nodes are deployed on VM.Standard2.1 Oracle Linux hosts.

  • Load balancer

    By default, the Oracle WebLogic Server servers (admin and managed servers) created by the operator are not exposed outside the OCI Kubernetes Engine cluster. To expose the application to the outside world, this architecture uses a public load balancer on the Load Balancing service. A public load balancer has a public IP address accessible from the internet. This architecture uses a load balancer with 100 Mbps for handling the traffic. If you need to handle more ingress traffic, you can choose higher bandwidth, up to 8,000 Mbps.

  • File storage

    To comply with best practices for running Oracle WebLogic Server domains, the domain configuration files in this architecture are stored in shared OCI File Storage that’s accessible from all WebLogic servers in the cluster. This setup offers the following advantages:

    • You don't need to rebuild Docker images for changes in the domain configuration.
    • Backups are faster and centralized.
    • Logs are stored by default on persistent storage.

Considerations

When implementing Oracle WebCenter Sites, consider these options.

  • Scalability

    You can scale out your application by updating the number of worker nodes in the Kubernetes cluster, depending on the load. Similarly, you can scale in by reducing the number of worker nodes in the cluster. On the Kubernetes cluster, when you create a service, you can create a load balancer to distribute service traffic among the nodes assigned to that service. You can create your persistent volume by using Terraform or the Oracle Java Web Console, and then reference it from the operator scripts. You can scale Oracle WebCenter Sites and clusters by adjusting the number of managed servers assigned to the cluster, independently of the number of OKE cluster nodes.

  • Application availability

    The Kubernetes cluster has three worker nodes for managed servers that are spread across different physical infrastructure, so that the Oracle WebLogic Server clusters have the highest availability.

  • Security

    Use policies to control who can your OCI resources and the operations that they can perform.

    OCI Kubernetes Engine is integrated with OCI Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM provides easy authentication with native OCI identity functionality.

    The Oracle WebCenter Sites container image is a self-contained image based on version 12.2.1.4 and above. You can install the Oracle WebCenter Sites container image in the following ways:

    • You can build and patch your own Oracle WebCenter Sites container image by using the WebLogic Image Tool; see Explore More.
    • Download a pre-built Oracle WebCenter Sites image from Oracle Support by referring to the document ID 2777062.1. This image is pre-built by Oracle and includes Oracle WebCenter Sites version 12.2.1.4.0 and the latest PSU.

    For test and development purposes, you can create an Oracle WebCenter Sites image using the Dockerfile as described in Creating Oracle WebCenter Sites Docker Containers. To understand how patching and upgrading works with Oracle WebCenter Sites Docker image see Explore More.

Explore More

Learn more about deploying Oracle WebCenter Sites on OCI Kubernetes Engine:

Review these additional resources:

Acknowledgments

  • Authors: Prabhakar Lingutla
  • Contributors: John Karasoulos, John Sulyok