Category Archives: General

All things general

Integration Cloud or SOA Suite?

02 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by in Cloud, General, OIC - ICS, Oracle, Technology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

A periodic conversation I get involved is the the relationship between Oracle’s SOA Suite and Integration Cloud. We’ve long held a view based on our conversations with Oracle product management.

There is a formal statement of direction for SOA Suite available ….

Click to access fusion-middleware-statement-of-direction.pdf

The bottom line as we read it:

  • SOA Suite isn’t going to be scrapped and customers will not be forced onto Integration Cloud.
  • Future changes are going to be on making transitions easier to the cloud, and a customer decision to adopt OIC.
  • Releases will focus on keeping things up to date and aligned with the underlying technologies from Java 8 to Java 11 as a long term release of Java. WebLogic version updates.
  • We’ll see mechanisms to cloud deliver integrations as the primary focus.
Continue reading →

Logging In Action – almost there

08 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by in Books, General

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

We’ve got the peer review comments back on the completed 1st draft back of the book. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thanks those who have been involved as peer reviewers, particularly those involved in the previous review cycles. I hope the reviewers found it satisfying to see between iterations that their suggestions and feedback have been taken on board and where we can.

The feed back is really exciting to read. Some tweaks and refinements to do to address the suggestions made.

The work on the Kubernetes and Docker elements and the chapter which has become available on MEAP has helped round that aspect off. But importantly, the final chapters help address the wider challenges of logging, and some of the feedback positively reflects this.

To paraphrase the comments, we’ve addressed the issues of logging which don’t get the attention that they deserve. Which for me is a success.

Oracle Cloud + GitHub Actions

05 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by in Cloud, development, General, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

While there is a deserved amount of publicity around the introduction of ARM compute onto OCI with the ARM Ampere CPU offering, and the amazing level of always free compute being provided (24GB of memory and 4 cores which can be used in any combination of servers). There have been some interesting announcements that perhaps haven’t drawn as much attention that they deserve. This includes OCI support for GitHub Actions, plus several new DevOps services and an Artifact Registry. We’ll comeback to the new services in another post. Today, let’s look at GitHub Actions.

Continue reading →

The Air Gap a Security Fallacy?

12 Saturday Jun 2021

Posted by in General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Securing systems through an air gap is an idea goes back decades, and through the 50s to as recently as the 2000s the idea that you could safely and successfully run and maintain systems by simply not connecting to a network protects them from vulnerabilities may have been true. But in the last ten or more years, I would argue it is a fallacy, that can lull people into a false sense of security and therefore more likely to take more risks (or at least not be as careful as we should be). This idea is a well established piece of psychology with modern cars (here for example). This is known as Risk Compensation (also more here) or an aspect of behaviour adaptation.

Whilst this is rather theoretical, perhaps we should illustrate in practical terms why it is both a fallacy, and in the modern day simply impractical.

Continue reading →

New and coming to a screen near you soon

31 Monday May 2021

Posted by in Books, FluentD, General, manning, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Last night saw the final chapter of Logging in Action with Fluentd go back to my editor. The next step is that Chapter (and others I hope) will go to MEAP, so early readers not only get the final chapter, but also the raft of improvements we’ve made. Along with that, the manuscript goes for a full peers review. Once that’s back, its time for a round of edits as I address the feedback then into copy editing and Manning sign off review.

As you might have guessed, we’ve kept busy with an article in the 25th edition of OraWorld. This follows Part 1 talking about GraphQL with a look at considerations for API Security.

In addition to that we’re working on a piece around automation of OCI management activities such as setting up developers, allowing them a level of freedom to experiment without accidentally burning through all your credits by spinning up Exadata servers or 500 node Kubernetes clusters.

We might even have some time to write more about APIs and integration.

Restriction on custom logging for OCI always free

26 Wednesday May 2021

Posted by in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

OCI Always Free compute node has a restriction that isn’t clearly documented or obvious when you go to a instantiate such compute resources. That restriction is the absence of OCI Custom logging. This is a little surprising given that this capability is based on Fluentd and the compute footprint needed by Fluentd is so small. In the following screen shot, as you can see when configuring the compute, there is no reason to believe you can’t use OCI Logging for custom logs.

Configuration for a logging agent on the Always Free VM

But when you go to configure the custom logging on your running compute, you can see that the feature is disabled with the message about the restriction. It would have been nice, to have the warning on the creation phase, as if I’d manually setup the VM then went to switch on OCI Logging knowing where I’d deployed my applications, I’d have wasted time in the setup.

Custom Logging Limitation

Solution, use one of the AMD Flex or Previous Generation to minimize the footprint to your needs.

UPDATE 09th June 2021

We’ve been told that the this constraint has been addressed. In addition Oracle also introduced the new Ampere offering which allows for nodes with a form factor of upto 4 OCPU and 24GB of RAM using the new ARM chips. You can also use variations on this such as 4x 1 OCPU 6GB RAM

Creating screenshots of application shells – easing the writing process

24 Monday May 2021

Posted by in General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

If you hadn’t noticed, I have been involved with writing several books as well as various blogs and journal contributions. One of the challenges when it comes to books particularly is when wanting to share a screenshot of a shell/console Window, be that a Linux shell (bash, ZSH, korn etc) Windows cmd or PowerShell.

All the different shells configured, note Git and Ubuntu in the list and integration to support Azure as well.
All the different shells configured, note Git and Ubuntu in the list and integration to support Azure as well.
Continue reading →

Blog Post on Oracle.com and more

19 Wednesday May 2021

Posted by in General, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

We recently received an invite to write a guest blog post for Oracle. We’re please to say it has gone live, and can be found at https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/oracle-cloud-infrastructure-logging-and-alert-rapid-smoke-testing-of-config-and-alerts. A little different to my typical posts. Hope you find it interesting.

Opening of the blog post on blogs.oracle.com
my Author Profile on blogs.oracle.com

World Festival Conference

We’ve also scored another success, this time we’ve been invited to speak at WorldFestival in August, this is an online conference organized by the same team behind DeveloperWeek. This is the first time outside of an Oracle linked event where I’ve been amongst the first few named speakers, so proud of that. The conference looks really interesting as it looks beyond just core developer themes with conference tracks on Space & Transportation, Smart Cities, Robotics, Digital Health to name a few of the 12 streams. Worth checking out.

WorldFestival Conference
World Festival Conference Themes