Sanae BEKKAR – My Blog –

Today’s article is special OCI networking topic and it took a valuable time to be finish.

It’s about the connectivity agent also called OIC connectivity agent or OIC Agent.

We are generally in a context of an hybrid integration , it means integrating on-premises (on site , legacy ..) apps to Oracle Cloud through Oracle Integration platform, knowing that the connectivity agent can be also installed in a 3rd party Cloud app.

Also this article is related to the new feature ‘Private Endpoints’ coming with Oracle Integration 3 , that will cover later.

The points that I will discuss here :

• What is the Connectivity Agent ?
• Communication flow with Oracle Integration.
• Key points to remember about the connectivity agent
• Main deployment patterns (part 2)

Let’s get started !

What is the Connectivity Agent ?

A connectivity agent is a pure Java application, certified in different platforms like Windows server , Oracle Linux .. And installed in the target host machine in few minutes 5-10.

All the Networking traffic use HTTPS .

The connectivity agent does not listen ,no inbound ports open.

It only use the port 443 (outbound) to communicate with Oracle Integration.

Connectivity agent is a highly available, you can have 2 agents in a single agent group. that run in active-active configuration. However , it is not recommended to use FTP adapter in active-active configuration , to avoid to read the file twice.

Logs Upload is available in OIC , no need to ask the customer for the logs . And it support 10Mb Message Payload same as OIC generally and 1Gb files & attachments.

Communication flow with Oracle Integration

Here is the main steps of the communication flow between the connectivity agent and Oracle Integration. :

1. Connectivity agent is installed in a private network (on-prem app , 3rd party Cloud app ..)
2. Connectivity Agent continues to listen to OIC
3. Within an orchestration flow , you call a connection that use the Connectivity agent => The Connectivity Agent retrieve the request payload.
4. Connectivity agent submit to the target.
5. Connectivity agent collect response payload.
6. Connectivity agent return it back to OIC.

Key points to remember about the Connectivity agent

• Agent does not permit any inbound connections.
• All communication. is secured using SSL.
• Connectivity agent checks for work by making outbound requests to OIC.
• Connectivity agent process requests by pulling msg from Oracle Integration across SSL.
• Connectivity agent posts responses by pushing messages to Oracle Integration across SSL.
• All communication is initiated by the Connectivity agent.

Let’s continue in the next article about the Connectivity agent deployment patterns.

Thanks for reading!