Now that Cloud Manager is here, we have self-service ability to create PeopleSoft environments in OCI. Cue Uncle Ben… “With great power comes great responsibility.” Having a self-service portal that allows for the creation of these environments is fantastic, but how do we put some controls around this awesome power? This is where Environment Template security comes in to play.

To create an Environment in Cloud Manager, you first need an Environment Template. This template is created using some General Details, a Topology, and finally Security. It is this security detail that will help us control who can use these templates to create environments in the future. When you are creating a template, you will see the following section 3 – Define Security in the wizard. Let’s break down what our options are.

Assign Template to Zone(s)

Templates can be assigned to a single or multiple Zones. As of Image 11, there are currently three zones to choose from:

• Development
• Test
• Production

A Zone is just “a logical grouping of environments,” according to Oracle’s Cloud Manager FAQ. At this time, it doesn’t serve any other purpose outside of helping you organize your environments. I could see a level of security being added to Zones in the future. If not by Oracle, maybe a custom bolt-on?

Assign Template to Role(s)

Templates can also be assigned to PeopleSoft security Roles. Any user that has a Role specified in this section will have the ability to create an Environment based on this template. Cloud Manager delivers three roles intended to be used with templates:

• Cloud Administrator (PACL_CAD)
• Cloud PeopleSoft Administrator (PACL_PAD)
• Self-Service User (PACL_SSC)

As you would expect with PeopleSoft security, you are free to create and use your custom roles here. I think the delivered roles make it clear how Oracle sees the breakdown of potential users. Users who admin OCI resources, users who admin PeopleSoft, and users of PeopleSoft who might want ad-hoc environments(thinking developers or maybe even business staff looking for demos). I could see the OCI and PS admin roles combined often. Also, the self-service user might be split out into a technical and functional role or disabled altogether. Each organization will have to review this for themselves and come up with a good policy. Just keep in mind, you can add multiple roles to each template.

Creating Environments

Once the security and other details are added to a template, it will be available to use when creating an Environment.

Only the templates the user has access to will be in the Template Name dropdown. The Zone dropdown will also be populated with available zones from the selected template. If a single zone were added, this would be auto-selected and read-only.

Overall, I feel that Environment Template security offers a lot of control. It gives us enough control to provide a level of self-service environment deployments if desired. I do look forward to seeing actual functionality added to Zones. It might be easier to manage this security if we could somehow control access by zone versus strictly individual template security.