This architecture shows the deployment of Oracle PeopleSoft applications in a single availability domain inside a single Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region.

For deployments in a multiple availability domain region, you can distribute application instances across the availability domains. In this architecture, the availability domain contains a virtual cloud network (VCN) with public and private subnets. The web servers, Elastic Search servers, Process Scheduler servers, application servers, and the PeopleTools clients are placed in the private subnet, and a public load balancer is used to distribute traffic across the application instances. Bastion hosts are deployed in a public subnet. All the application, Bastion server, and load balancer instances are deployed in one compartment with Cloud Guard enabled. The database instances are deployed in a separate compartment with security zones and Cloud Guard enabled.

This setup provides pre-built best practice security policies that are applied automatically to all resources in the compartments. All resources are deployed across multiple fault domains to provide high availability.

The database and the application instances that are deployed in their private subnets on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are backed up to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage by using a service gateway. A service gateway provides access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage without traversing the internet. You can use the automatic and on-demand database backups feature to back up applications and the database.

Use a Network Address Translation (NAT) gateway to enable outbound connection from the application instances in the private subnets to the Internet to download patches as well as to apply operating system and application updates. With a NAT gateway, the hosts in private subnet can initiate connections to the Internet and receive responses, but won’t receive inbound connections initiated from the Internet.

The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture.

Description of the illustration deploy_psft_oci-png.png

The architecture has the following components:

• Bastion host

  The bastion host is a compute instance that serves as a secure, controlled entry point to the topology from outside the cloud. The bastion host is provisioned typically in a demilitarized zone (DMZ). It enables you to protect sensitive resources by placing them in private networks that can't be accessed directly from outside the cloud. The topology has a single, known entry point that you can monitor and audit regularly. So, you can avoid exposing the more sensitive components of the topology without compromising access to them.

• Application servers

  Redundant instances of the PeopleSoft application servers, PeopleSoft web servers, ElasticSearch servers, and PeopleSoft Process Scheduler provide high availability. Set up redundant instances of all servers to ensure that you continue accessing the application even if an instance goes down.

• PeopleTools Client

  Use the PeopleTools clients to perform administration activities, such as development, migration, and upgrade.

• Database tier

  This tier contains the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure database system instances. For high availability requirements, Oracle recommends that you use two-node Oracle Real Application clusters (Oracle RAC) database systems or an Oracle Database Exadata Cloud service system of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

• Oracle 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.

• Customer premises equipment (CPE)

  CPE is the on-premises endpoint for the VPN Connect or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect interconnection between the on-premises data center and the VCN in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

• 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.

• 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 define.

• Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)

  The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic 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.

• 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. 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.

• NAT gateway

  The NAT gateway enables private resources in a VCN to access hosts on the internet, without exposing those resources to incoming internet connections.

• Service gateway

  The service gateway provides access from a VCN to other services, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage. The traffic from the VCN to the Oracle service travels over the Oracle network fabric and never traverses the internet.

• Internet gateway

  The internet gateway allows traffic between the public subnets in a VCN and the public internet.

• Security zone

  Security zones ensure Oracle's security best practices from the start by enforcing policies such as encrypting data and preventing public access to networks for an entire compartment. A security zone is associated with a compartment of the same name and includes security zone policies or a "recipe" that applies to the compartment and its sub-compartments. You can't add or move a standard compartment to a security zone compartment.

• 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.

  Use regional subnets.

• Security

  Use Oracle Cloud Guard to monitor and maintain the security of your resources in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure proactively. 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.

  For resources that require maximum security, Oracle recommends that you use security zones. A security zone is a compartment associated with an Oracle-defined recipe of security policies that are based on best practices. For example, the resources in a security zone must not be accessible from the public internet and they must be encrypted using customer-managed keys. When you create and update resources in a security zone, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure validates the operations against the policies in the security-zone recipe, and denies operations that violate any of the policies.

• Virtual machine and other recommendations

  For virtual machine sizing and other recommendations, see Deploying PeopleSoft Applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Instances.

When deploying Oracle PeopleSoft applications in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, consider these points.

• Availability

  Some regions offer multiple availability domains, which allow higher availability with higher redundancy. Consider deploying your e-commerce solution on multiple availability domains to take advantage of this redundancy. Also, consider having a disaster recovery setup in a different region with the appropriate redundancy.

• Cost

  When creating virtual machines, use flexible shapes to select the number of CPUs and the amount of memory you need for the workloads that run on the instance. This flexibility enables you to build virtual machines that match your workload, allowing you to optimize performance and minimize cost.

• Monitoring and Logging services

  Set up logging service, monitoring, and alerts on CPU and memory usage for your instances, so that you can scale the shape up or down as needed.

Learn more about deploying Oracle PeopleSoft applications in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Review these additional resources:

• Best practices framework for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

• Run PeopleSoft on OCI