Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS on the AWS Cloud

Quick Start Reference Deployment

QS

November, 2020
Satheesh Kumar Thiyagarajan - Skillnet Solutions, Inc.
Dave May - Partner Solution Architect, Quick Start team

Visit our GitHub repository for source files and to post feedback, report bugs, or submit feature ideas for this Quick Start.

This Quick Start was created by SkillNet Solutions, Inc. in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Quick Starts are automated reference deployments that use AWS CloudFormation templates to deploy key technologies on AWS, following AWS best practices.

Overview

This Quick Start reference deployment guide provides step-by-step instructions for deploying Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS on the AWS Cloud.

This Quick Start is for Customers who are looking to either migrate or host Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS Workload to AWS. The objective of this playbook is to provide a prescribed Migration framework for hosting Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS (transaction and reporting server) on AWS.

Amazon may share who uses AWS Quick Starts with the AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner that collaborated with AWS on the content of the Quick Start.

Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS on AWS

Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS suite enables in-restaurant functions in medium to large enterprises across geographical regions. The Oracle POS suite relies on centrally hosted server applications to which the distributed in-store clients connect for data and transactional needs.

Retail enterprises have traditionally hosted the central applications on premises. Typically, these services would support connections from stores located in multiple geographies across time zones using a variety of local internet service providers. These pose a multitude of issues including availability, latency and scaling to support peak loads. Retailers are looking at utilizing AWS Cloud platform to host the Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS workload to realize the benefits such as gaining:

  • Reliability

  • High Availability

  • Business Agility

  • Faster Deployment Time

  • Low Latency

Cost

You are responsible for the cost of the AWS services used while running this Quick Start. There is no additional cost for using the Quick Start.

The AWS CloudFormation template for this Quick Start includes configuration parameters that you can customize. Some of the settings, such as the instance type, affect the cost of deployment. For cost estimates, see the pricing pages for each AWS service you use. Prices are subject to change.

After you deploy the Quick Start, enable the AWS Cost and Usage Report to deliver billing metrics to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket in your account. It provides cost estimates based on usage throughout each month and aggregates the data at the end of the month. For more information about the report, see the AWS documentation.

Software licenses

There are several licenses required for this Quick Start, with multiple combinations of bring-your-own-license (BYOL) and AWS managed options:

  • Oracle Hospitality Simphony (BYOL)

  • Oracle Database 12c (BYOL)

  • Oracle Enterprise Linux (GNU General Public License (GPLv2))

  • Microsoft Windows Server (BYOL / AWS Managed)

Architecture

Deploying this Quick Start for a new virtual private cloud (VPC) with default parameters builds the following Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS environment in the AWS Cloud.

Architecture
Figure 1. Quick Start architecture for Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS on AWS

As shown in Figure 1, the Quick Start sets up the following:

  • A VPC configured with public and private subnets, according to AWS best practices, to provide you with your own virtual network on AWS.*

In the public subnets:

  • Managed network address translation (NAT) gateways to allow outbound internet access for resources in the private subnets.*

  • A Linux bastion host in an Auto Scaling group to allow inbound Secure Shell (SSH) access to EC2 instances in public and private subnets.*

In the private subnets:

  • Oracle database running on EC2 instance for Simphony and Reporting and Analytics (R&A) applications database.

  • Application server running on EC2 instance for Simphony and Reporting and Analytics (R&A) applications deployment.

  • A Puppet server running on EC2 instance for Oracle database installation, JDK installation and Windows IIS server configuration.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automate the creation, retention, and deletion of snapshots of the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes. Automating snapshot management accomplishes the following:

  • Protects valuable data by enforcing a regular backup schedule.

  • Retains backups as required by auditors or for internal compliance.

  • Reduces storage costs by deleting outdated backups.

DLM is configured as follows: * The EC2 tag ( Name: LCM_TAG , Value: SIM ) key-value pair is used to take snapshots. * The most recent 3 snapshots are retained. * A copy of each snapshot is stored in another AWS Region for data redundancy.

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps Engineers, Developers, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS. You can use CloudWatch to detect anomalous behavior in your environments, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep your applications running smoothly.

*The template that deploys the Quick Start into an existing VPC skips the components marked by asterisks and prompts you for your existing VPC configuration.

Planning the deployment

Specialized knowledge

This deployment guide requires a moderate level of familiarity with AWS services. If you’re new to AWS, visit the Getting Started Resource Center and the AWS Training and Certification website. These sites provide materials for learning how to design, deploy, and operate your infrastructure and applications on the AWS Cloud.

This Quick Start assumes familiarity with the Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS Suite, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and Puppet.

AWS account

If you don’t already have an AWS account, create one at https://aws.amazon.com by following the on-screen instructions. Part of the sign-up process involves receiving a phone call and entering a PIN using the phone keypad.

Your AWS account is automatically signed up for all AWS services. You are charged only for the services you use.

Technical requirements

Before you launch the Quick Start, your account must be configured as specified in the following table. Otherwise, deployment might fail.

Resource limits

If necessary, request service quota increases for the following resources. You might need to request increases if your existing deployment currently uses these resources, and this Quick Start deployment could result in exceeding the default quotas. The Service Quotas console displays your usage and quotas for some aspects of some services. For more information, see the AWS documentation.

Resource This deployment uses

VPCs

1

Elastic IP addresses

1

Security groups

1

IAM roles

1

Auto Scaling groups

3

EC2 instances

4

Data Lifecycle Manager

1

Supported Regions

  • us-east-1 (N. Virginia)

  • us-east-2 (Ohio)

  • us-west-1 (N. California)

  • us-west-2 (Oregon)

  • ca-central-1 (Canada Central)

  • eu-central-1 (Frankfurt)

  • eu-west-1 (Ireland)

  • eu-west-2 (London)

  • eu-west-3 (Paris)

  • ap-southeast-1 (Singapore)

  • ap-southeast-2 (Sydney)

  • ap-south-1 (Mumbai)

  • ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo)

  • ap-northeast-2 (Seoul)

  • sa-east-1 (South America)

  • eu-north-1 (Stockholm)

  • ap-east-1 (Hong Kong)

  • me-south-1 (Bahrain)

  • af-south-1 (Cape Town)

  • eu-south-1 (Milan)

Certain Regions are available on an opt-in basis. Refer to the AWS Documentation on Managing Regions for more information.

IAM permissions

Before launching the Quick Start, you must log in to the AWS Management Console with IAM permissions for the resources and actions the templates deploy.

The AdministratorAccess managed policy within IAM provides sufficient permissions, although your organization may choose to use a custom policy with more restrictions.

This Quick Start requires a custom AMI provided by SkillNet Solutions, Inc. upon request.

Deployment options

This Quick Start provides two deployment options:

  • Deploy Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS into a new VPC (end-to-end deployment). This option builds a new AWS environment consisting of the VPC, subnets, NAT gateways, security groups, bastion hosts, and other infrastructure components. It then deploys Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS into this new VPC.

  • Deploy Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS into an existing VPC. This option provisions Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS in your existing AWS infrastructure.

The Quick Start provides separate templates for these options. It also lets you configure Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) blocks, instance types, and Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS settings, as discussed later in this guide.

Deployment steps

Sign in to your AWS account

  1. Sign in to your AWS account at https://aws.amazon.com with an IAM user role that has the necessary permissions. For details, see Planning the deployment earlier in this guide.

  2. Make sure that your AWS account is configured correctly, as discussed in the Technical requirements section.

Launch the Quick Start

You are responsible for the cost of the AWS services used while running this Quick Start reference deployment. There is no additional cost for using this Quick Start. For full details, see the pricing pages for each AWS service used by this Quick Start. Prices are subject to change.

  1. Sign in to your AWS account, and choose one of the following options to launch the AWS CloudFormation Template. For help with choosing an option, see deployment options earlier in this guide.

Deploy Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS into a new VPC on AWS

Deploy Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS into an existing VPC on AWS
If you are deploying Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS into an existing VPC, make sure that your VPC has two private subnets in different Availability Zones for the workload instances, and that the subnets aren’t shared. This Quick Start doesn’t support shared subnets. These subnets require NAT gateways in their route tables to allow the instances to download packages and software without exposing them to the internet.

Also, make sure that the domain name option in the DHCP options is configured as explained in the Amazon VPC documentation. You provide your VPC settings when you launch the Quick Start.

Each deployment takes about 30 minutes to complete.

  1. Check the AWS Region that’s displayed in the upper-right corner of the navigation bar, and change it if necessary. This is where the network infrastructure for Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS will be built. The template is launched in the us-east-1 Region by default.

  1. On the Create stack page, keep the default setting for the template URL, and then choose Next.

  2. On the Specify stack details page, change the stack name if needed. Review the parameters for the template. Provide values for the parameters that require input. For all other parameters, review the default settings and customize them as necessary.

In the following tables, parameters are listed by category and described separately for the deployment options. When you finish reviewing and customizing the parameters, choose Next.

Unless you are customizing the Quick Start templates for your own deployment projects, we recommend that you keep the default settings for the parameters labeled Quick Start S3 bucket name, Quick Start S3 bucket Region, and Quick Start S3 key prefix. Changing these parameter settings automatically updates code references to point to a new Quick Start location. For more information, see the AWS Quick Start Contributor’s Guide.

  1. On the options page, you can specify tags (key-value pairs) for resources in your stack and set advanced options. When you’re done, choose Next.

  2. On the Review page, review and confirm the template settings. Under Capabilities, select the two check boxes to acknowledge that the template creates IAM resources and might require the ability to automatically expand macros.

  3. Choose Create stack to deploy the stack.

  4. Monitor the status of the stack. When the status is CREATE_COMPLETE, the Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS deployment is ready.

  5. Use the values displayed in the Outputs tab for the stack, as shown in Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS outputs after successful deployment, to view the created resources.

cfn_outputs
Figure 2. Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS outputs after successful deployment

Post deployment steps

Disable the Auto Scaling Group for the Oracle Database, Application Server and Bastion Host.

  1. Select Auto Scaling Group for Oracle Database.

  2. In the Details tab, click the "edit" button.

  3. Click on the "Suspended Processes" link and select all the processes in the list, to suspend all the processes.

  4. Repeat all the above steps for Application server and Bastion Host, also.

Security

Monitoring Infrastructure

You can also use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the AWS Cloud resources the applications you run on AWS. Amazon CloudWatch enables you to monitor your AWS resources in near real-time, including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes and Database instances. Metrics such as CPU utilization, latency, and request counts are provided automatically for these AWS resources. You can also supply your own logs or custom application and system metrics, such as memory usage, transaction volumes, or error rates, which Amazon CloudWatch will also monitor.

With Amazon CloudWatch alarms, you can set a threshold on metrics and trigger an action when that threshold is exceeded. For example, you can create an alarm that is triggered when the CPU utilization on an EC2 instance crosses a threshold. You can also configure a notification of the event to be sent through SMS or email. Real-time alarms for metrics and events enable you to minimize downtime and potential business impact.

Support

The SkillNet Solutions, Inc. support team is standing by to assist you with setting up Oracle Hospitality Simphony POS on your AWS environment. Send an email to support_simphony@skillnetinc.com to contact the support team.

FAQ

Q. I encountered a CREATE_FAILED error when I launched the Quick Start.

A. If AWS CloudFormation fails to create the stack, we recommend that you relaunch the template with Rollback on failure set to No. (This setting is under Advanced in the AWS CloudFormation console, Options page.) With this setting, the stack’s state is retained and the instance is left running, and will thus help troubleshoot the issue. (For Windows, look at the log files in %ProgramFiles%\Amazon\EC2ConfigService and C:\cfn\log.)

When you set Rollback on failure to Disabled, you continue to incur AWS charges for this stack. Please make sure to delete the stack when you finish troubleshooting.

For additional information, see Troubleshooting AWS CloudFormation on the AWS website.

Q. I encountered a size limitation error when I deployed the AWS CloudFormation templates.

A. We recommend that you launch the Quick Start templates from the links in this guide or from another S3 bucket. If you deploy the templates from a local copy on your computer or from a location other than an S3 bucket, you might encounter template size limitations. For more information about AWS CloudFormation quotas, see the AWS documentation.

Send us feedback

To post feedback, submit feature ideas, or report bugs, use the Issues section of the GitHub repository for this Quick Start. If you’d like to submit code, please review the Quick Start Contributor’s Guide.

Quick Start reference deployments

See the AWS Quick Start home page.

GitHub repository

You can visit our GitHub repository to download the templates and scripts for this Quick Start, to post your comments, and to share your customizations with others.

© 2020, Amazon Web Services Inc., or its affiliates, and SkillNet Solutions, Inc.. All rights reserved.

Notices

This document is provided for informational purposes only. It represents AWS’s current product offerings and practices as of the date of issue of this document, which are subject to change without notice. Customers are responsible for making their own independent assessment of the information in this document and any use of AWS’s products or services, each of which is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, whether expressed or implied. This document does not create any warranties, representations, contractual commitments, conditions, or assurances from AWS, its affiliates, suppliers, or licensors. The responsibilities and liabilities of AWS to its customers are controlled by AWS agreements, and this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement between AWS and its customers.

The software included with this paper is licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0 (the "License"). You may not use this file except in compliance with the License. A copy of the License is located at http://aws.amazon.com/apache2.0/ or in the accompanying "license" file. This code is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either expressed or implied. See the License for specific language governing permissions and limitations.