The Cloud Application Foundation (CAF)

WebLogic Server is part of Oracle Cloud Application Foundation (CAF), which is defined as a superset of products provided by Oracle that enable the infrastructure for building cloud environments for private or public clouds, hosting end-user applications.

Here's a graphical representation of the CAF stack, followed by a description of each component:

Oracle Traffic Director

Oracle Traffic Director is a high-speed, layer-7 (the application layer of the OSI Model) load balancer that can be set as the main entry point for HTTP and HTTPS traffic for large volumes, low latency, and mission-critical systems. It is optimized for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and leverages InfiniBand fabric for more throughput.

It can be configured to do traffic routing and to offload SSL/TLS, acting as the termination point for HTTPS requests, reducing the overhead of security processing on the application server. Also, it can improve performance for clients through content caching and reducing impact on the backend servers.

Oracle Tuxedo

Oracle Tuxedo runs mission-critical C/C++/COBOL applications in x86 servers or cloud environments, with ultra-high performance and linear scalability. It provides service-oriented infrastructure to manage distributed transaction processing, tracking participants, and monitoring XA two-phase commit, thus, ensuring that transactions are all committed or rolled back properly.

Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder

Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder provides an easy way for system administrators to configure new environments of multitier applications in cloud and virtualized environments. It allows drawing blueprint diagrams of the application topology and wire logical connections between the different appliances that compose the architecture.

Oracle Exalogic and WebLogic 12c

Oracle Exalogic is an engineered system, which means that it provides the best-of-breed components (storage, compute nodes, network, operating system, and software products) that are tested, tuned, and optimized to deliver extremely high performance. It can be considered as the evolution of Oracle Grid architecture as it moves into a concept of a Private Cloud in a Box platform, ideal for consolidation of mission-critical and cloud systems.

WebLogic 12c is fully supported on Oracle Exalogic and has many enhancements that can be enabled through WebLogic's Administration Console. These enhancements leverage the Exalogic architecture and tune WebLogic Server to perform using the benefits of SDP API, for example.

Tip

SDP or Socket Direct Protocol is a low-level network technology that provides higher throughput. It is supported by JDK 7 and can be used for inter-process communication in WebLogic.

Other major features that can be enabled for Exalogic are as follows:

• Scattered reads and gathered writes: This feature allows us to increase the efficiency during I/O in environments with high network throughput

• Lazy deserialization: This feature allows us to increase efficiency for session replication

• Self-tuning thread pool optimization: This feature allows us to increase efficiency of the self-tuning thread pool by aligning it with the Exalogic processor architecture threading capabilities

This book will not discuss WebLogic 12c features that are specific to Exalogic systems, but it is important to know what can be accomplished through the use of Oracle-engineered systems.