Category Archives: Oracle

All things related to Oracle

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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Oracle Cloud + GitHub Actions

05 Monday Jul 2021

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

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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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New and coming to a screen near you soon

31 Monday May 2021

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

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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

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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

Blog Post on Oracle.com and more

19 Wednesday May 2021

Posted by in General, Oracle, Technology

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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

OraWorld Magazine – Latest Edition

09 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in APIs & microservices, General, Oracle, Technology

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The latest edition of OraWorld has become available to today. With its blend of insight into the Oracle community, and Oracle technologies from database to modern apps. I have to own up and say, I mention the magazine not only because of the beautifully crafted independent insights, but also it includes an article from myself. Taking a look at GraphQL what it is and how recent new Oracle product features could make a big difference to the GraphQL adoption opportunities.

The next edition should include a follow up article to this focussing on API security considerations.

Extracting Dependencies and Versions for a Node Solution

15 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by in development, NodeJS Cloud, Technology

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We have had a requirement from a customer to be able define every package including dependencies within a Node solution (as it happens Apollo GraphQL), not only the complete download path but the version numbering as well. There are many ways to solve this problem. But here is an elegant(?) and portable answer. To ensure that we don’t get pollution from a global node space we created a project package in an empty folder using:

 npm init --yes

This defaults all the package,json settings which for our requirements is fine. Then in the same location its npm install <product from the npm registry to pull> e.g. for Apollo GraphQL: 

npm install apollo-server graphql

This will bring down to your npm project all the dependencies putting them in the node_modules child folder. We’re now in a position to retrieve all the details of the packages, their dependencies and version information. This can be done by using the command:

npm list --json
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OKit – OCI Design (on Windows)

08 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

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OKit is a tremendous tool for the visual design and development for your Oracle Cloud environment. Visualizing your networks, positioning of service gateways and so on makes it a lot easier than filling in web forms or writing Terraform files as you can see the relationships between the different parts far more easily. For the same reason really that a lot of people use Visio and other tools for this work. The real beauty is that OKit can generate the Terraform and Ansible scripting that can then be used to deliver the implementation.

Okit for visual design of Oracle Cloud

The tool isn’t currently an official Oracle product, but something built by the Oracle A-Team (a small team of gurus who have a role blending developer advocacy, architect supporting customers for the special edge cases and providing thought leadership). But we can hope that someone brings it into the fold and perhaps even incorporates it securely into the cloud dashboard. In the mean time, the code in its entirety is available on GitHub.

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