In the previous chapter, we looked at monitoring and some elements of administration. In this final chapter, we are going to look at core administration capabilities, particularly the use of the importing and exporting of integrations and what this enables you to achieve, including the availability of a marketplace of extensions. We shall discuss the ICS API and the Cloud Adapter Software Development Kit as the foundations to extend the management of ICS, as well as how to build your own adapters.
Finally, the integration space is an ever-evolving part of IT and is becoming the core foundation of nearly all software solutions. Within this, the rapid growth of cloud technology has meant this is perhaps one of the quickest evolving areas of software technology. So, we shall take a look at how we can keep abreast of developments, particularly for ICS, as well as where to get more information that will help with using ICS and understanding the key underpinning technologies.
The ability to be able to import and export either individual integrations, connections, lookups, or groups of integrations (known as packages), provides us with the means to achieve a number of different things; the most common of those being the following:
- Keeping integrations and related objects under configuration management
- Separation of the development of integrations from production environments
- Exploiting prebuilt integrations from vendors other than Oracle
- Synchronizing configuration of lookups across many environments
- Distributing integrations into different environments, or making them available for others to use
In addition to importing and exporting whole integrations, you will have noticed through our journey in this book that parts can be discretely imported and exported separately. For the purposes of this chapter, we are only going to concentrate on the larger import and export activities, but the motivations for performing a focused operation are often the same as when you are performing the same process at coarser grained levels.