As a customer, one of the challenges is to have a bridge that will connect various OCI services or other third-party tools/solutions with OCI services. To overcome these challenges we have a great solution provided by OCI which is Service Connector Hub. It is now generally available in all commercial regions.
Service Connector Hub provides a single access point to monitor all data movement providing a centralized place where administrators can manage and monitor data movements across all their services within and from OCI to third-party tools.
In this blog, I’ve covered:
- Overview of Service Connector Hub
- Access Service Connector Hub
- Authentication and Authorization
- Flow of Data
- How it helps
- Integrations
- Use Case Scenarios
- Conclusion
Overview of Service Connecter Hub
Service Connector Hub is a cloud message bus platform that offers a dashboard to perform activities Describing the tasks, Executing the tasks, and Monitoring the movement of data.
Developers can use Service Connector Hub to build event-driven applications with Functions and Notifications. Fix issues automatically with code or can alert engineers so that they can get notified and take action as required. As a developer, you can get started quickly with a single API with a reduced learning curve. It also supports the use of command-line interface (CLI) and API to create service connectors.
It allows administrators to easily set up granular policies that govern access to and interaction with service connectors. It is a free service across all OCI regions and customers will only pay for the source and destination services between which data is moved. .
Access Service Connector
You can access the Service Connector Hub service using the
1) Console (a browser-based interface)
Log into the Console: Open the navigation menu. Under Solutions and Platform, go to Logging, and then click Service Connectors (or go to Logging and then click Service Connectors on the left).
2) REST API.
3) You can also directly go to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console and search from the console search bar on top.
Also Check: Our blog post on OCI Network. Click here
Authentication and Authorization
Each service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integrates with IAM for authentication and authorization.
The administrator needs to set up groups, compartments, and policies that control which users in your organization can access which services, which resources, and the type of access. For example, the policies control who can create new users, create and manage the cloud network, launch instances, create buckets, download objects, etc.
If you’re a regular user in your organization who needs to use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources that your company owns, you need to connect to your administrator to set up a user ID for you. The administrator can confirm which compartment or compartments you should be using.
To move data, you must give your service connector the required authorization to write to the specified target resource in the target service. (Service connectors can read all supported source services.)
A default policy is provided which offers the required authorization when you use the Console to define the target service for a service connector. This policy is limited to the context of the service connector. You can either accept this default policy or make sure you have the proper authorizations in a group-based policy.
Read our blog to know more about Policy In Oracle Cloud (OCI)
Flow of Data
When a service connector runs, it receives data from the source service, completes optional tasks on the data (such as filtering), and then this data which we have gathered from the source service can be utilized for various different purposes like integrating it with different services like Functions, Monitoring, Notifications, Object Storage, and Streaming services i.e. the target services.
Also Read: Our blog post on Oracle IAM. Click here
How Does it Help?
A great advantage of the service connecter hub is the seamless integration with third-party services. A good example of such services is Oracle Cloud’s Kafka-compatible Streaming service, which enables seamless integration with third-party Kafka tools without any retooling or changes to your operational posture. You can apply different Filters for moving data that govern data movement between source and destination services.
Another big advantage of this service is the ease of use for setting up service connectors to move data to Object Storage, Streaming and Monitoring, or trigger Functions and Notifications is extremely easy. Does not require any coding.
Also Read: Our blog post on Network Load Balancer. Click here
Integrations
The OCI Service Connector Hub integration with the Logging service, allows you to move logs from Logging to Object Storage, Streaming, and Monitoring and to trigger Functions and send Notifications.
Service Connector Hub integrates with OCI IAM (Identity and Access Management) and is secure by default. Access to Service Connectors can be controlled to selectively grant permissions to users and groups of users.
Use case scenarios
- Analytics: For organizations that use various tools like Data Dog and Splunk, for extra data processing and running analytics now integration is possible with the support for third-party tools also.
- Archiving Data: Many organizations need to store logs, metrics, and stream messages for compliance and future use. Service Connector Hub helps to store such data in an inexpensive manner in the long term.
- Log Notifications: For site and database reliability, alarms and notifications could be set up when we get certain errors such as 500 errors. These alarms could be integrated with monitoring service also.
- Process Data: Triggers can be set for Oracle functions so that data is preprocessed in integration with Service Connector Hub. This makes it easier for data engineers to directly work on the processed data for data analysis.
- Cloud resources change Notifications: SCH could be integrated to send notifications through email, PagerDuty, Slack, Custom Webhooks.
- Full visibility over data movement: Service Connector Hub offers one destination from where administrators can manage and monitor data movements across all their services.
Conclusion
Service Connector Hub is generally available for all and can be used with third-party tools. Take logs and other data and store them easily for the long term. There is no cost added for using this service.
This service helps with the inter-service exchange of data in OCI as well as with other external applications.
Related/References
- 1Z0-1072-20 | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2020 Architect Associate
- Object Storage Service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
- Network Security Groups (NSGs) Vs. Security List (SL): When to use What?
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): Region, AD, FD, Tenancy, Compartment, VCN, IAM, Storage Service
- Networking In Oracle Cloud (OCI): VCN, Subnet, Gateways, Peering, Transit Routing
- Announcing VCN flow logs general availability for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- Private DNS in Oracle Cloud (OCI) with Case Study
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