Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Overview of Managing Applications Environments

Learn features of Applications Environment management.

Note

If you purchased Fusion Applications, see Fusion Applications Environment Management for information on setting up and managing your Fusion Applications environments.

When you purchase a subscription to Oracle Applications you are provided a tenancy in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to provision and maintain your applications environments. During the order activation process, you can create a tenancy, or if you already have a tenancy, you can assign your subscription to an existing one. After the subscription is assigned, you are ready to create the environments where your applications will run.

Application environment management on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides self-service lifecycle management of your applications environment. The lifecycle management tasks include:

  • Creating production and non-production environments
  • Monitoring environment status
  • Applying subscription updates
  • Adding environment management users

Applications Environment Management Concepts

Here are some terms you may encounter when creating or managing an applications environment. Because the environments are running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, it is helpful to understand some basics about the features of OCI.

ENVIRONMENT TYPE or INSTANCE TYPE
The environment or instance type options will vary depending on the application.
Oracle Maymiser, offers INSTANCE TYPES and provides the instance type options of Maxymiser and Recommendations.
Some applications provide PRODUCTION and NON-PRODUCTION environment or instance types.
The PRODUCTION environment supports your day-to-day real-time business operations by authorized users.
Test and development environments are both NON-PRODUCTION environments. The test environment is typically used for staging before application deployment to production and for validation of maintenance updates before the same maintenance is applied to the production environment. Development environments (also referred to as Additional Test Environments or ATEs) are typically used as individual or collaborative development sandboxes for developing extensions (such as reporting, pages, and interfaces) or integrations with other applications. The number and types of environments allotted to your tenancy depend on your order.
REGION

A region is where your environments are physically hosted. This region is not the same as the geographical region that you selected on your subscription order.

COMPARTMENT

Compartments are a fundamental component of OCI for organizing and isolating your cloud resources. You can use them to logically separate resources for the purposes of measuring usage and billing, access (through the use of policies), and isolation (separating the resources for one project or business unit from another). For example, if you need to grant access to one group of users to your test environment and another group of users to your production environment, you can assign your test and production environments to different compartments. For more information, see Understanding Compartments.

IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT (IAM)
IAM is the service that provides authentication and authorization for OCI resources. You interact with the IAM service when you create users, groups, and policies to manage your applications environments.
POLICY
OCI IAM uses policies to specify who can access which resources. Access is granted at the group and compartment level, which means you can write a policy that gives a group a specific type of access within a specific compartment, or to the tenancy itself. If you give a group access to the tenancy, the group automatically gets the same type of access to all the compartments inside the tenancy. For more information, see Getting Started with Policies.
RESOURCE IDENTIFIERS or OCIDs

Applications environment management supports environments as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources. Most types of resources have a unique, Oracle-assigned identifier called an Oracle Cloud ID (OCID). For information about the OCID format and other ways to identify your resources, see Resource Identifiers.

Authentication and Authorization

Applications environment management uses the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure IAM service for authentication and authorization.

An administrator in your organization needs to set up groups  and policies  that control which users can access which services and resources. For example, to allow other users to manage applications environments you'll need to create a group for these users and write a policy that grants the group access to the applications environments. If your organization will be using other OCI services, you'll need to write policies specifically for those services.

Getting Started with Applications Environment Management

The following workflow describes the main tasks to get started managing your applications environments:

  1. Order a subscription and perform the order activation steps.
  2. Sign in to your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) tenancy.
  3. On the Applications Console, your application is listed and you are prompted to create an environment for your new subscription. To learn more about environments, see Planning an Applications Environment.
  4. When you are ready to create the environment, click Create Environment in the Applications Console. Follow the steps described in To create an environment.
  5. After your environment is provisioned, the administrator can start using the application. See your application-specific documentation for setting up the application and adding users.
  6. (Optionally) Add more users to manage environments. See Managing User Access to Applications Environments.