FXLoader on Oracle Cloud PaaS – PaaS4SaaS
FXLoader
FXLoader is a cloud application that integrates currency rates, from leading sources, into Oracle ERP Cloud (Fusion) and other ERP applications.
It is currently the top-ranked app on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.
Oracle PaaS
Oracle Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides Oracle technology components on Oracle Cloud.
FXLoader on Oracle PaaS
The FXLoader Cloud Service was first released in January 2015.
From the beginning, we knew our application would be hosted on Oracle Cloud, as our primary integration would be with Oracle ERP Cloud.
When deciding which flavour of Oracle Cloud, our ideal outcome was to have Oracle run the infrastructure and platform as far as possible, leaving us free to concentrate on the application.
Of course, there is a potential downside to such PaaS offerings; we don’t get access to the ‘back-end’ of the platform. So, we would be reliant on Oracle to keep the platform running and to include all the elements we need. Frankly, we didn’t think we would achieve our ideal, as we felt we’d need access to add missing components. But when we tested the ‘fully managed’ offerings, we found everything that we needed had already been thought of and included.
We chose the Oracle Database for our application. The core of the application is automated, scheduled integration jobs for our clients, and the database does scheduling really well. Oracle Application Express (APEX) was the perfect fit for the application pages clients use to configure their scheduled integration. APEX also provides the packages for calling web services to get and send the FX rates.
The initial Oracle Cloud implementation in 2015 was on Database Schema Service and we moved to Exadata Express in 2018. On both platforms, we rely on Oracle to manage the hardware, operating system and the database. With Exadata Express we get a pluggable database on which we run our application.
In this setup, Oracle manages the availability of the platform, including backups and performance. Of additional concern to us is the availability of the SSL/TLS certificates in Oracle Wallet, as all web services are called over HTTPS and we have no access to add certificates ourselves. The results of using these cloud services have been overwhelmingly positive:
Platform Availability
We have experienced just one outage that affected us in almost four years. The database scheduler had an issue after a database upgrade, but this was resolved within a few hours and actually didn’t affect our clients as we could run our background process manually during that time.
All other unplanned outages have been so short we have not been affected.
Planned outages are minimal and notified in advance. They are done at a time that does not affect our clients.
Certificates
Every certificate that we have ever needed, for all sources of data and target applications, was always available in advance. We’ve never had to request a certificate be added to Oracle Wallet.
Of course, this also means we never need to go through the process of adding or updating certificates ourselves, it’s just another part of the platform that is done for us.
There is no other cloud platform, from any provider, that can do all this for us. Being able to focus 100% on our application and our clients has made us as successful as we are. And if you want to find out how this all works for our clients, take a look at their comments towards the bottom of https://fxloader.com and on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace https://cloudmarketplace.oracle.com/marketplace/app/FXLoader