Category Archives: Oracle

All things related to Oracle

Presenting with Oracle, Flexagon and Heathrow Airport

11 Thursday Nov 2021

Posted by in General, Oracle, Podcasts, Technology

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We’re excited to be presenting on November 16th 4.30pm CET (3.30pm GMT). I hope you can join us by registering here

Heathrow rapidly moves to Oracle Cloud and connects with hybrid Integration.

The continuous delivery of constant small innovations can bring benefits faster without risks. Join us to hear how Capgemini’s Agile Innovation Platform (AIP) combined with Flexagon’s FlexDeploy DevOps platform enable this model of innovation and achieve tangible benefits to customers using the cloud capabilities and traditional on-premises ERP.

Phil Wilkins, Capgemini Integration Architect, and Dan Goerdt, President of Flexagon will describe how the combination are highly effective at delivering micro-innovation demonstrated through real-world customer results.

From this session, you will learn:

  • How the Agile Innovation Platform’s building blocks and templates allow development teams to reduce time to value.
  • How FlexDeploy brings unique benefits to both Open Source and Oracle-specific technologies.
  • What were the challenges solved and benefits gained by actual customers using AIP and FlexDeploy.
  • How Integration is the foundation of continuous delivery and innovation.

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.
Continue reading →

Another post on blogs.oracle.com

19 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

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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

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.

Continue reading →

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.