All about Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS)
The democratization stage of smartphones is now over. It is now a fact and a feature of society. Their use is daily for a large part of the population, even continuous for some. In 2017, 73% of French people own a smartphone (source ARCEP).
In 2017, mobile was the most used medium to connect to the internet, ahead of computers and tablets. This reality is also present in the professional environment and companies are increasingly adapting to this trend in order to take advantage of it.
IT Strategy
What is MCS?
Released in 2015, Oracle MCS (Mobile Cloud Service) is a cloud PaaS solution facilitating backend management for mobile applications, both native and hybrid.
We can thus speak of MBaaS, or Mobile Backend as a Service. The panel of functionalities is quite large and covers all aspects of the connection processes between the mobile application and the company’s servers or other cloud services.
This ranges from user management, to the implementation of REST APIs, to the security of exchanges, to data analysis and storage, etc.
Why use MCS?
With this diversity of uses, MCS addresses in fact several types of profiles present in the realization of a project, not only technical as one could think:
● Mobile developer: selects from platform APIs and works to design Custom APIs.
● Services developer: implements in Node.js (Javascript) the backend part with Connectors and Custom APIs
● Enterprise Architect: manages data provenance, users, security policies, roles and permissions
● Mobile project manager: uses the Analytics part to determine the types of usage of the application, statistics
● Administrator: uses the Administration and Diagnostics tabs to monitor the activity of services in production
What kind of application for MCS?
Oracle offers an SDK (Software Development Kit) for native applications for each platform: Android, iOS, Windows Phone. Hybrid applications are not left out, with a JavaScript SDK that makes MCS usable on Cordova or Oracle JET.
These SDKs provide a set of objects and methods to connect the application to MCS and to use the proposed functions, such as connection to a mobile backend, authentication, requests to APIs, etc.
Customer use cases
As part of the HRIS overhaul project of one of our clients, SQORUS proposed to develop a mobile application meeting the needs of directors and managers.
It is a group HR directory giving access to employee profiles (personal and professional information, LTI, career plan, succession plan, etc.) and to graphs on KPIs defined by the client.
The architecture was divided as follows:
● Client-side application (hybrid developed under Ionic 2)
● Oracle MCS Mobile Backend
● Microsoft Azure server for “on form” data access.
The figure below shows the organization of the different components involved in the project architecture. The mobile application communicates with MCS via REST APIs developed in Javascript.
These APIs then link to connectors that can call external services (Oracle cloud, customer’s dedicated servers, etc). MCS allowed us to associate our customer’s SSO and to provision users very quickly, replicating the existing security. Thus, the scope of each account is respected so as not to present a person with data that should not be accessible to them.
The monitoring part allowed us to follow the adoption and use of the application over time. Thanks to the event log, we were also able to identify usage scenarios and queries that could fail.
The future with MCE (Mobile Cloud Enterprise)
Mobile Cloud Enterprise is a complete cloud platform for Web, Mobile and Bots.
With MCS, Oracle is tackling a market where 3 big names usually stand out: Amazon AWS Mobile Hub, Microsoft Azure Mobile Apps and Google Cloud Platform.
These platforms offer very similar features. Their differences are in ease of use and support, performance for each use, and pricing.
Oracle has set up a YouTube channel dedicated to MCS, including a series of videos explaining the principles of operation as well as the actual implementation…