Business Case and Benefits
Oracle Applications E-Business Suite (EBS) is an Enterprise-wide suite of integrated applications such as CRM, Supply Chain/Logistics, HR/Payroll, Procurement, Finance, Payables/Receivables etc., which is implemented within organisations to automate business operations. It also consumes an enormous part of the overall IT budget. But this does not mean that the organization needs to purchase or lock themselves into expensive and/or legacy on-premise hardware and subsequently put hard limits on the scalability of the suite, and therefore the ROI.
A supported cloud vendor such as AWS takes away all the limitations on flexibility and scalability, and drastically cuts down upfront capital expense, while at the same time providing resilient infrastructure that scales globally.
At Blue Crystal Solutions, we have successfully helped customers move from traditional/legacy datacentres onto AWS and helped many with installation of new environments that they could test-drive, where they have immediately started noticing the benefits. This is the first paper in the series on this topic, which describes a simple installation.
Prerequisites and Implementation
An AWS IAM account is needed with appropriate privileges (or the root account can be used to begin with) to create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) spanning all the Availability Zones (AZ), after which we would need to create a private subnet in each AZ. This setup will provide private connectivity to the corporate network. For internet facing applications, each AZ needs to have a public subnet and a private subnet, with the public subnet hosting the mid-tier servers with elastic IPs, and the private subnet hosting the database servers.
The Network Access Control List (NACL) of the public subnet and security groups of instances launched in it should allow for inbound (and response) http and https traffic. In E-Business suite, for the default port pool, the http port would be 8000. The https port is configurable independent of the port pool. The NACL and security groups for the private subnet and instances inside it respectively, should allow for database traffic(stateful) from public to private subnet, and allow http/https traffic(stateful) from private to public subnet.
The VPC needs a Network Address Translation (NAT) gateway for the instances to fetch OS updates and allow to download Oracle software. Either a Virtual Private Gateway, along with Internet Protocol Security (IPSEC) connectivity to on-premise/customer data centre, or an AWS Direct connect setup is required. This will be discussed in future papers.
Ensure the instances being launched have sufficient capacity. An r5.4xlarge (16vCPU/128GB) for each of the database and middle tier nodes is sufficient to perform smooth installation and testing. Each instance should have a 300+GB EBS volume (can be Elastic Block Storage (EBS) backed root). Ensure this volume is much less than 1T as cloud Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7+ environments provide filesystem for root volumes, and this is a 64-bit only filesystem, with 64-bit inodes. So, 32-bit applications won’t be able to access files/folders which have inodes that utilize higher than 32 bits. A 300GB root EBS volume has been found to be safe.
AWS Architectural Diagram
