Planning an Environment Family

If your organization has purchased subscriptions for multiple applications across Oracle Fusion Customer Experience (CX), Oracle Fusion Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM), you would typically provision all your Fusion Applications in the same environment. To provision them in the same environment, you add them all to the same environment family. However, if your business needs require that you run specific subscriptions in different environments, you can create multiple environment families to support those.

After you create an environment family, if you purchase a new subscription or add applications to an existing subscription, you can update the environment family to include the new applications.

When you create an environment family, you select a geographical region where the environments will be created. All the environments in a family are created in the region selected for the environment family.

Things to consider when selecting a region:

• The geographical location of your organization.
• The geographical location of your customers. Be aware of data privacy laws that might require customer data to be maintained within specific geographical borders.
• The regions supported by the applications.

For a list of all regions available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, see Regions and Availability Domains.

For information on how to enable more regions for your tenancy, see Managing Regions.

For information on how to change the region you are currently working in, see Switching Regions.

In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, a compartment is a logical grouping of resources for controlling access to those resources. Placing resources in compartments allows you to restrict access to as granular a level as you require.

For example, if your tenancy has multiple environment families, you can restrict access to each family to different groups of users by placing them in different compartments. You then write policy to allow access based on the group and compartment. If you don't specifically choose a compartment (or if your organization has not set up multiple compartments) the environment family will be created directly in the tenancy (also called the root compartment). If your organization chooses to set up compartments later, you can move the environment family to a different compartment.

Also, if you plan to have different administrators for your environment families and your environments, you can place each of them in different compartments to create different access policies for each. For more information about planning compartments, see Learn Best Practices for Setting Up Your Tenancy.

Oracle automatically runs maintenance on your environments to apply feature updates and patches to your applications, according to your maintenance policy schedule. During some types of maintenance, the environment and all applications running on the environment are not accessible during the maintenance window. Oracle notifies you in advance of upcoming maintenance times. You can also get information about upcoming maintenance at any time on the environment details page. You have options for choosing when and how often maintenance occurs in your environments, although some applications have contractually mandated maintenance schedules.

When you create an environment family, you define a maintenance policy for all the environments in the family. Some aspects of the policy can be customized per environment.