Category Archives: Cloud

Demo Fluentd using Ubuntu with optional inclusion of OpenSearch and OCI Log Analytics

17 Wednesday Aug 2022

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

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One of the areas I present publicly is the use of Fluentd. including the use of distributed and multiple nodes. As many events have been virtual it has been easy to demo everything from my desktop – everything is set up so I can demo things very easily. While doing this all on one machine does point to how compact and efficient Fluentd is as I can run multiple instances concurrently it does undermine distributed capabilities somewhat.

Add to that I now work for Oracle it makes sense to use OCI resources. With that, I have been developing the scripts to configure Ubuntu VMs to set up the demo environments installing Ruby, Fluentd, and various gems needed and pulling the relevant configurations in. All the assets can be found in the GitHub repository https://github.com/mp3monster/logging-demos. The repository readme includes plenty of information as well.

While I’ve been putting this together using OCI, the fact that everything is based on Ubuntu should mean it can be run locally on VMs, WSL2, and adaptable for MacOS as well. The environment has been configured means you can still run on Ubuntu with a single node if desired.

Additional Log Destinations

As the demo will typically be run on OCI we can not only run the demo with a multinode setup, we have extended the setup with several inclusion files so we can utilize OCI services OpenSearch and OCI Log Analytics. If you don’t want to use these services simply replace the contents of several inclusion files including files with the contents of the dummy_inclusion.conf file provided.

Representation of the Demo setup

The configuration works by each destination having one or two inclusion files. The files with the postfix of label-inclusion.conf contains the configuration to direct traffic to the respective service with a configuration that will push log events at a very high frequency to the destination. The second inclusion file injects the duplication of log events to each service. The inclusion declarations in the main node Fluentd config file references an environment variable that should provide the path to the inclusion file to use. As a result, by changing the environment variable to point to a dummy file it becomes possible o configure out the use of one of the services. The two inclusions mean we can keep the store declarations compact and show multiple labels being used. With the OpenSearch setup, we have a variant of the inclusion file model where the route inclusion can reference the logic that we would use in the label directly within the sore declaration.

The best way to see the use of the inclusions is to experiment with setting the different environment variables to reference the different files and then using the Fluentd dry-run feature (more on this in the book).

Setup script

The setup script performs a number of tasks including:

  • Pulling from Git all the resources needed in terms of configuration files and folders
  • Retrieving the necessary plugins against the possibility of their use.
  • Setting up the various environment variables for:
    • Slack token
    • environment variables to reference inclusion files
    • shortcut environment variables and aliases
    • network (IP) address for external services such as OpenSearch
  • Setting up a folder for OCI tokens needed.
  • Setting up temp folders to be used by OCI Plugins as a file-based cache.

Using OpenSearch

OpenSearch setup is documented in a tutorial here, and a Reference Architecture at the time of writing there isn’t a one-click deploy Terraform available in the Oracle Reference Architecture library on GitHub.

Currently, the setup for OpenSearch means manually adding the node1 index into the configuration.

Useful Links:

Log Analytics

Feeding the log analytics service is a more complex process to set up as the feeds need to have metadata about the events being ingested. The downside is the configuration effort is greater, but the payback is that it becomes easier to extract meaningful information quickly because the service has a greater understanding of the content. For example, attributing the logs to a type of source means the predefined or default log formats are immediately understood, and maximum meaning can be retrieved from the log event.

Going to OCI Log Analytics does cut out the need for the Connections hub, which would allow rules and routing to be defined to different OCI services which functionally can help such as directing log events to PagerDuty.

Useful Links

Demo Enhancements to come

There are a few things we’re planning to do with the demo:

  • Create a terraform script to perform all the environment setup
  • Integrate the configuration script into the terraform
  • Provide some simple dashboard insights for OpenSearch – currently, this is all manual
  • Basic setup for OCI Log Analytics

Testing Terraform

26 Tuesday Jul 2022

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Infrastructure as Code (IaC) should be treated the same way as any other code. That is to say that we should be considering configuration management, testing, regression, code quality, and coverage. We should be addressing these points for the same reasons we address them with our application code. Such as ensuring that we don’t introduce bugs as things evolve and develop, ensuring that the code is maintainable over a prolonged period etc.

The problem is that the only real way to test IaC is to run it. Particularly with the likes of Terraform where it is largely declarative rather than containing a lot of logic. This point is nicely conveyed by Yevgeniy Brikman’s presentation (below)

The presentation goes on to illustrate Terratest which has the look and feel of JUnit or any other xUnit test framework. Terratest is implemented in Golang, But to be honest, given the nature of Terraform ( largely declarative meaning it enables ideas of composition and not sophisticated logic) it means the writing of the tests isn’t going to demand anything clever like how to achieve polymorphic behavior through Go’s type structures.

While Yevgeniy focussed on testing by invoking an application on the infrastructure deployed something we’ve described though our Platform Test logic (more here). You may wish to test things further by interrogating infrastructure components. For example, do I have the right number of nodes in a dynamic group or are container or server logs going into the cloud monitoring services.

Performing such checks is very easy with OCI as it provides a Golang SDK making it very easy to write tests that can call the OCI APIs and interrogate the setup. Better still when considering whether the Terraform configuration will behave correctly to support dynamic/auto-scaling can be done easily without modifying the Terraform configurations as part of the Terratest logic can include Go API calls to temporarily modify scaling triggers or invoking code that can stimulate OCI dynamic features.

Testing App Configuration

There is an interesting question to be considered. There is a point of separation between when to use Terraform (or Pulumi and others for that matter) and tools better suited to application deployment and configuration like Ansible and Chef. Therefore should we separate the testing of these details? Maybe I am too purist but seeing local and remote execs in Terraform as these actions are very opaque and can be used to conceal things or unwittingly depend on the way Terraform handles its dependency graph.

Of course, Ansible has its test framework ansible_test and has the means to measure test coverage. So one possibility is to treat Ansible as a separate module, independently test it, and then integrate its use in the wider picture of deploying infrastructure.

Knowledge Resources from Oracle

05 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

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Before joining Oracle I used to typically refer to a couple of key resources from Oracle – docs.oracle.com, and occasionally developer.oracle.com and ateam-oracle.com. We’d obviously use cloud.oracle.com and the main oracle.com to be able to reference published stats, success references etc. Now I’m part of the company and working in the OCI product team with an outbound side of things, I needed to gem up on all the assets that exist. So that we can help contribute, and ensure that they are up to date etc. In doing so, the number of resources available is so much more than I’d realized.

Upon reflection, this may have been from the fact we didn’t drill down deeply enough, also in part that Capgemini has its own approaches and strategies as well.

This in part is linked to the organizational structures e.g. OCI Product Management’s outbound work overlaps with the Marketing Developer Relations, for example, something that is inevitable in an organization that provides such a diverse portfolio of products.

For my own benefit, and for others to exploit, the following table summarises the different areas of information. The nature of the content and – where content overlaps or is presented in different ways.

We’ve moved this content so it can be easily revised to here (and accessible from the site menu). But also available here …

Domain AddressDescription
oracle.comThis is the commercial side of the Oracle content. But includes a landing page for a lot of Oracle knowledge/documentation.
docs.oracle.comThe home of the core Oracle documentation for all products.
blogs.oracle.comOracle blogs primarily from Oracle staff covering different parts of the organization, covering employment diversity through to each of the major product families, domain verticals such as Retail, Hospitality. The blogs are broken into groups, so it’s worth bookmarking the product groups of interest, for example, Infrastructure.
In addition to the product spaces, there are blogs that come from teams such as the A-Team – Infrastructure, Java Magazine,
A-TeamThe members of this team are the ‘gurus’ of product application. These cover a range of domains – structured in a similar way to blogs.oracle.com with different posts. These posts represent patterns and solutions to problems encountered by the team. How to, or not to implement things.
This can overlap with some blogs in so far as both product blogs and A-Team blogs may address how to leverage product features.
developer.oracle.comDeveloper relations lead, which covers not only Oracle products but also the application of open source. By its very name, there is a strong emphasis on coding (rather than low-code) covering not just Java, but .Net languages such as C#, Node, JavaScript, and so on.
There is some content overlap here with the Architectural Center, where Architecture Centre provides reference solutions.
docs.oracle.com/solutions
(AKA Architecture Center)		This is the Architecture Center which provides reference solutions. But these aren’t exclusive to the SaaS products (which would be easy to interpret). A lot of examples cover deploying and running open-source solutions on IaaS, for example, Drupal, WordPress, and Magento to name just a couple. A lot of these are backed up with scripts, Terraform, and code to achieve the deployment and configuration.
In addition to this, there are use cases of what customers have deployed into production (known as built and deployed).
docs.oracle.com/learn/This contains a lot of free tutorials and labs that can be taken a run to implement different things, from deploying a Python with Flask solution on Kubernetes to Creating USB Installation Media for Oracle Linux with Fedora Media Writer. As you can see from these examples, the tutorials cover both Oracle products and open source.
These resources interlink with the Architecture Centre and can overlap with developer.oracle.com.
github.com/oracle-devrelThis contains the code artifacts developed by Developer Relations and the Architecture Center team. So covers Reference Architectures, tutorials, and Live Labs all freely available to use.
github.com/oracle-samplesThis repository contains example solutions and Terraform logic developed by groups such as the A-Team.
opensource.oracle.comThis provides a catalog of links to the various open-source repositories available. This includes oracle-sample and devrel but also the many other projects including, but not limited to Helidon, Fn, Verrrazano, GraalVM, Apiary
community.oracle.com/hubThis is where a lot of the Q&A for Oracle Partners and users takes place. Community participation is gamified to encourage participation.
academy.oracle.comThis is really for the educational community (Universities, Colleges & Schools) and provides resources to take you from zero to certified skills for Java and Oracle Database.
education.oracle.comPrimarily for the formal Oracle certification resources, but there are some free training resources here as well.
apex.oracle.comAPEX has its own area of dedicated resources. This includes solutions, templates, and other development resources, and community.
github.com/oracleThis is the home for the majority of all Oracle free code, including the Open source projects such as Helidon, JET, Kubernetes Operators, and so on.
Helidon, Fn, and other source projectsA number of Oracle open source projects have their own independent web resources as well. Helidon includes additional technical resources.
The ones we know more about are :
Helidon, Fn, Verrrazano, GraalVM, Apiary
Bit it includes references to Java core language etc.
www.youtube.com/oracleYouTube training videos. With multiple channels based on different technologies.
Java (OpenJDK and Oracle JDK)Oracle propel not just their main JDK /JRE which has license constraints, but also Open JDK. With this comes a dedicated Developer zone as dev.java.
PaaS CommunityManaged by Jurgen Kress (Prod Mgr for Oracle PaaS). It acts as an aggregator for contributions from the community and shares news about what is happening within Oracle to support customers and partners in the PaaS space.
Developer CommunityPartner site to the PaaS Community with a focus on more development activities around Weblogic, Helidon, etc.
Oracle PodcastsPerhaps not access usable as documentation, how-to, etc. but Podcasts can yield a lot of broad picture insights. Oracle has a range of podcasts covering a diverse range of subjects. Not all podcasts are active at any one time. But the site provides a catalog and episode list.

Kubernetes Best Practises – Review & Mindmaps

13 Thursday Jan 2022

Posted by in APIs & microservices, Cloud, Cloud Native, development, General, Technology

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I’ve had some time to catch up on books I’d like to read, including Kubernetes Best Practises in the last few weeks. While I think I have a fair handle on Kubernetes, the development of my understanding has been a bit ad-hoc as I’ve dug into different areas as I’ve needed to know more. This meant reading a Dummies/Introduction to entry style guide would, to an extent, likely prove to be a frustrating read. Given this, I went for the best practises book because if I don’t understand the practises, then there are gaps in my understanding still, and I can look at more foundation resources.

As it goes, this book was perfect. It quickly covered the basics of the different aspects of Kubernetes helping to give context to the more advanced aspects, and the best practices become almost a formulated summary in each section. The depth of coverage and detail is certainly very comprehensive, explaining the background of CNI (Container Network Interface) to network-level security within Kubernetes.

The book touched upon Service Meshes such as Istio and Linkerd2 but didn’t go into great depth, but again this is probably down to the fact that Service Mesh ideas are still maturing, and you have initiatives like SMI (Service Mesh Interface still in the CNCF’s sandbox).

In terms of best practices, that really stood out for me:

  • Use of Taints and Tolerations for refined control of pod deployment (Allowing affinity to be controlled to optimise resilience, or direct types of pod deployment to nodes with specialist capabilities such as GPU).
  • There are a lot more differences and options then you might realize in terms of ingress controller capabilities, so take time to identify what you may need from an ingress controller.
  • Don’t forget pods can be scaled vertically with the VPA (Vertical Pod Autoscaler)as well as horizontally through the HPA.
  • While using a managed persistence service will make statement storage a lot easier, stateful sets will give you a very portable solution.

As with a lot of technical books I read. As I go through the book I build up a mind map of what I think are the key points. Doing so leaves me with a resource I can use as a quick reference, but creating the mind map helps reinforce the learning. So here is the mind map …

Greening our work compute needs

13 Monday Dec 2021

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As a consultant working with clients, we always need to address security considerations for clients, their networks and data. Typically this might mean ensuring I could connect to the correct network through a VPN with the secure client software installed. Then work through a Citrix set-up for the tools we’re allowed to use.

Since the start of the pandemic, there seems to be a marked shift towards issuing consultants with customer provided laptops that have been configured and locked down. This means I can’t use the client laptop to connect to my employer’s network to interact with our own systems – making it easy to leverage our existing resources to support the customer and conversely no trust or contractual position that might allow our company devices connecting to a VPN or ring-fenced part of a network.

Interestingly there seems to have been a drift away from the ideas of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) which may come from the fact that outside of smaller very tech-savvy organizations, BYOD can be seen as challenging to support.

As this Google Trends report shows over the last five years the trend has been until the last couple of months showing a generally downward trend. Not authoritative proof, but hints that it hasn’t accelerated as you might expect given remote working.

By the customer supplying a laptop, there is an effort to control intrusion and other security risks. But the problem is, now I have a device that I could easily take off-line and work to defeat the security setup and the client would be non the wiser, or worse it is another laptop that could ‘get lost’ or ‘stolen’ with a greater chance of having sensitive material. Every new device is without a doubt an elevated risk for the client and a cost to support (this of course is also an argument for not applying BYOD).

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Automating OCI Tasks with OCI Python SDK #JoelKallmanDay

11 Monday Oct 2021

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

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This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the Oracle Cloud SDK (check here), but it seems rather fitting, as some of the utilities I’ve been working on are open to the community, and #JoelKallmanDay is all about community. If you’d like to know more about #JoelKallmanDay then checkout Tim Hall’s blog here.

Oracle have provided a very rich API and then overlaid it with a number of SDKs in Python, Java etc. The SDKs immediately remove the work of creating connections and correct payloads. Taking the Python SDK for example, all I need to do is create a standard configuration file with all the necessary connection properties to my OCI instance. Then it’s simply a case of creating the correct Python object for the correct group of services wanted. Then it’s down to populating the object attributes. This is the illustration of exactly what a good SDK does. I can lean on my IDE to use the correct set and get operators. The code for establishing a connection is done for me.

What I’ve found most striking is the level of consistency in the methods provided by the SDK regardless of the service. This makes it very easy to develop functionality without needing to check every API before I can write any code. it would be easy to say, so what. But when you look at the breadth of the OCI services it becomes more impressive.

The convenience doesn’t end there. Rather than having to run your utilities from a local command line (Python means we’re pretty much OS agnostic), the Oracle Cloud shell is preconfigured with Python, OCI SDK, GitHub and FTP server and basic Linux text editors. The all amounts to the fact that you can use your scripts/tools from within the web UI of OCI. Edit your credentials file locally, push and pull any changes to the scripts from the shell and any Git repo such as GitHub.

With this insight, we just need to build that catalogue of accelerator tools to make those repetitive processes just a little easier. For example ensuring that when you tear down your manually created services all interlinked entities are deleted first (which can be troublesome with policies, groups, compartments and so on).

Integration Cloud or SOA Suite?

02 Thursday Sep 2021

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

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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.
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Another post on blogs.oracle.com

19 Monday Jul 2021

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Just a quick post to say that I’ve had another post published over on Oracle’s blog site about Automating developer setup in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You can read it at: https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/automating-developer-setup-in-oci

Oracle Cloud + GitHub Actions

05 Monday Jul 2021

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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.

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Restriction on custom logging for OCI always free

26 Wednesday May 2021

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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