Cloud Design Patterns

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Technology

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Cloud, Cloud Design Patterns, CSA, design patterns, forthcoming book, Oracle, Patterns, Prentice Hall, Thomas Erl

The book reviewing opportunities are coming thick & fast. In addition to currently providing review feedback on a forthcoming book on Apache Camel to be published by Packt (previous blog entry), I’ve been fortunate to get the opportunity to review another book in development as part of the Thomas Erl Technical Series, this time on Cloud Design Patterns. From what I’ve seen before, the books is unsurprisingly going to have a similar style to the other patterns books in the series. It is also living upto the same high standard of insight. You can see some information from the website that will be supporting the book at http://www.cloudpatterns.org/ and the from the publisher at http://servicetechbooks.com/cloudpatterns.

In looking at some background to one of the patterns, it was also interesting to note that despite Oracle now having focused a lot of its massive resources at cloud offerings, has no apparent involvement with the Cloud Security Alliance, even though most of the other businesses that Oracle could consider to be potential competitors or are premier partners are associated with it (CSA Corporate Membership).

Oracle Press – Free EBooks

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General, Oracle, Technology

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ebook, free, Oracle, Oracle Press, publications, UKOCN

So Oracle Press have been celebrating 20 years of publications. As part of that celebration they have over the year offered a number of eBooks for free. The UKOCN site have pulled a list of these free books together along with relevant links for request the ebooks – go checkout http://www.ukocn.com/article/oracle-press-free-copies – if this link doesn’t work (UKOCN maybe preventing deep links) then go to http://www.ukocn.com/ and visit articles, and you should see an article called “ORACLE PRESS FREE COPIES!”. at the time of writing this post this is on the homepage of listed articles.

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Learning Ansible Review Part 2

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General, Technology

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Ansible, book, environments, Git, Packt, Playbooks, review, Spec

Example Ansible playbook

So having had a significant introduction to Ansible and its capabilities, chapter 2 gets into developing Ansible Playbooks. To do this the book confronts development practises of environment creation and management scripts, or the tendency for ops teams not to apply development like rigour. It is refreshing to read things like ….

… seen these practices at close quarters, we firmly believe that these are more or less similar to voodoo practices that need to be done away with.

Excerpt From: “Learning Ansible.” Packt Publishing.

The book does there for dig into the basics of using Git, and illustrating it using the configuration files from an earlier example. The next step would be if you follow development practises to use a Continuous Integration (CI). The book is surprisingly brief on this subject, compared to say Git.

In a development lifecycle the next step is to test, which elegantly introduces Ansible and Vagrant for instantiating virtual machines that the Ansible playbook can be tested against.

This creates the environment by which several additional capabilities provided by Ansible can aide testing activities particularly the ability to tag activities and then run the Ansible script targeting the specifically tagged activities. The additional ability that allows Ansible Playbooks to be executed in a way that allows it only tell what would be changed, rather than perform the change.

The book takes you on from there to introducing how Serverspec could be used. Things for me gain a little too much velocity, perhaps it doesn’t help that I am not familiar with Ruby.

The final part of the chapter and we’re back on solid ground with options on configuring SCM solutions such as Git to support deployment and how Ansible can support the same playbook in different environments such production, preproduction where the playbook is the same but you will be working with different server ids and credentials.

Even if you weren’t to use Ansible there are some thought provoking and good principles for config management and system scripting here.

So by having completed the first two chapters all the principle of Ansible are covered along a range of guiding practises that reflect good development practises in the context of producing environment management. There are limits and the next chapters then go into how to build upon the basics for so it is easy to create more advanced Playbooks for real world environments with capabilities like playbook iteration, including Playbooks within Playbooks and conditionals for example.

The chapter builds upon the simple examples used on the first chapters showing how the Playbooks can be made to be a lot smarter. For example rather than a task to install each individual application required you can build a table of configuration values and get the task to iterate through the set of RPMs and versions for example. The structures to iterate over can be multi dimensional so you can define some advanced configuration and keep the tasks simple. By building on the earlier examples it helps highlight the benefits of the feature being explained which really helps.

Other features explained here include handlers, so you can trigger one or more activities to be performed once the playbook tasks have completed – so restarting processes can be executed only when all tasks are completed for example. Other development like features like including other Playbooks are introduced (inline with the idea of DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself). This leads into using roles, where than identifying your target servers by name or IP you can bring everything together by assigning the server roles e.g. DBTier, AppTier etc. The final two elements are the approach to templating using the Python Jinga2 framework and most crucially given that you will be handling configuration data and passwords Security.

Another couple of well written chapters that embody both insight into Ansible but also hung on the good development ideas so even if you choose not to use Ansible, some of the thinking here could be applied or at-least used to formulate questions as to how the ideas might translate to chef or puppet for example.

Packt Book Promo to 5th March

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

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book, book promotion, ebook, free, Packt

Packt are running a promotion for those on their mailing list – a bit like the Christmas promotion, free ebook each day, until 5th March. Check it out here. So best sign up to the emails!

Learning Ansible Review Part 1

05 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Technology

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Ansible, automation, book, Chef, Packt, Puppet, review, SSH

I was going to publish the first part of my review of the Packt book Learning Ansible after every couple of chapters, but the preface and 1st chapter are pretty substantive not mention starts to address some of my questions regarding Ansible compared to Puppet and Chef.

So the first thing that is sticking is that the author’s style is a very easy to read flowing style. It means that your entire focus is on the content, and you don’t feel like you’re being lectured.

The preface is carries a lot of really valuable content setting the context and capabilities into which Ansible is working. It openly identifies the other leading products covering the different aspects in which someone interested in the space would want to know about or may already understand. So the following areas are called out:

Configuration Management
Provisioning
Deployment
Orchestration
Monitoring and Alerting
Logging

Chapter 1 pretty much faces into the question of differentiating Ansible from Chef and Puppet. The key being that Ansible is not a master and distributed client model which Puppet and Chef offer (although both offer a Masterless models which just distribute the client). What is missing from this initial conversation is that consideration of security. In a master and client model security can be stronger because even if you compromise the master, you still have an intermediary in the agent to protect against malicious actions. Where as breaching the Ansible node means you will have obtained SSH access to all the nodes available for management as this is how Ansible interacts with the nodes it is managing.

Despite this, the arguments are simply laid out, particularly the other significant difference is that a lot of the client-agent approaches mean they offer an abstraction of the types of activities you might want for example install an application which are abstracted from the likes of msi, yum, Red Hat Network and so on. The argument for not having this is that to provide abstraction you potentially end up dropping to the lowest common denominator (unless the tool implements capabilities not naturally available on the platform). A very fair and valid argument. It is also likely in an enterprise environment you’re probably using a small set of different types of environment and potentially only type type of environment for different solutions I.e. Your website is unlikely to be hosted by servers running Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora.

The first chapter takes you through a series of simple examples derived from a classic variant of IT’s classic Hello World solution. This does make for a sizeable first chapter (about 1/5th of the book) but does introduce all the core principles, ideas and capabilities that are embodied and provided by Ansible. If you want to know whether Ansible is likely to meet what you want to do then reading just this chapter will probably give you a view on whether you’re likely to be able to do what you want.

Although the book makes references to the support of Windows, but this is still in Alpha phase (Ansible Windows is Coming).This does mean that the examples are Linux only. Additionally it appears from the ansible site (the book doesn’t provide any indication of this) the central Ansible node(s) will still have to be Linux. The book in this case appears to trying to future proof itself. We hope that the author will provide Windows equivalent downloadable demos.

The long and short of it, a great start to a book.

Another book review on the way

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books

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Ansible, book, Chef, code ignite, Packt, Puppet, review

Packt Publishing have given me the opportunity to review their book on Learning Ansible – an IT environment/apps/deployment automation framework. Should be interesting to see how Ansible compares to the big names of Chef and Puppet. Flicking through the book, there appear to be plenty of examples and illustrations using common open source tools such as MySQL and Apache.

We’ll blog as we go, so should have a post every few chapters, so watch this space.

Things are going to be busy as I am also technically reviewing another Camel Book for Packt as well.

Oracle Free EBook on Enterprise Mobility

26 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Oracle, Technology

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ebook, enterprise, free, mobile, Oracle

Oracle a free Ebook about enterprise Mobility – it can be downloaded from https://blogs.oracle.com/imc/entry/free_oracle_special_edition_ebook1 The book focuses on the following areas:

Mobile Trends and Concepts
Mobile Architectures, Integration, Scalability, and Security
Exploring the Oracle Mobile Platform

Push Notifications with a Bit of Java

24 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Oracle, Technology

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12c, Apache Maven, archetype, Eclipse, IDE, IntelliJ, java, JDeveloper, jProwlAPI, maven, mvn, Oracle, Oracle Java Cloud, OTN, POM, prowl, ProwlAPI, sourceForge

So continuing from my previous posts:

We’re going to use the Prowl API and create the equivalent classic “Hello World” App using the push framework – but cutting out the need for Growl etc. For this blog post we’re not going to use the Oracle Java Cloud as we need to see the code working locally and get ready to promote the code to the cloud. Once we’ve got some code working we can look at setting up the Java Cloud environment, package and promote what we have here using our IDE into the cloud environment.

As we’re cutting Java code now – you can obviously use your own preferred IDE, I’m going to use JDeveloper 12c if for no other reason than it being a huge improvement on 11g (download here) and I’ve become somewhat disappointed with Eclipse. Whilst talking about IDEs; you should be aware that Oracle provide an Oracle Cloud SDK which integrates with a number of IDEs to make some of the interactions with the cloud straight forward.

The SDK provides Ant and Maven scripts to help the build and deploy process – so we will be using those later, plus command line tools to help manage other activities, a number of code examples and HTML documentation. To setup the SDK you will need to unpack the file into a folder and add that folder into your PATH environment variables. The bundle includes a readme that contains just enough to show what is required to get unpacked and make the command line tools work.

To download from Oracle you will need to setup an Oracle Technology Network (OTN) account – so if you don’t have one now is the time to create one – there is no cost to this, we’re going to need

We could use the REST based API that is provided by the ProwlApp, but at least to start with we’re going to follow the approach using a library to make using the API very simple. By using the API provided on SourceForge (jProwlAPI). Using an API will allow us to show the use of 3rd party libraries in the cloud deployment but also follows some of the Oracle ideas of offering ‘adaptors’ to simplify integration.

So you need to download:

JDeveloper 12c – http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jdev/downloads/index.html (if you want to use JDeveloper as shown)
The jProwlAPI from SourceForge
Oracle Cloud SDK

So with this downloaded we are going to:

Setup an new Maven based project (or copy my file structure into place and import) using a maven quickstart archtetype (org.apache.maven.archetypes:maven-archetype-quickstart) . We will probably need to modify this later to leverage the full cloud capable archetype. This will build your project environment and retrieve a bunch of plugins you might need.

Next lets take a peak inside of the jProwlAPI download. You’ll see an example bit of java that shows how to fire the API. Rather than tinker with this we have created a small package and JUnit test as we would if writing a proper solution created with the maven archetype.

We also need to make the JProwlAPI jar file available to the project. So we use maven pattern, and create a folder called lib and copy the jar file into it. We then add the lib folder to project setup.

To be able to create the deployable artefact we need to load the jar file into the local repository, which we can do with a command line instruction (presuming maven is also available by your PATH variable).

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=./lib/JProwlAPI-0.5.jar -DgroupId=prowl -DartefactId=JProwlAPI -Dversion=12.1.3-0-0 -Dpackage=jar

We’ll come back to the command line in a bit, but within JDeveloper the code I have provided needs 1 change from yourself – replace the references to –YourAPIKey– in the run execute command and in the JUnit class with your own key.

In the the ProwlProcessor class I have included a man in method so we can just execute the class to see things working. So having done that we can then repeat by running the class via the JUnit test. You should see the same result. When we we’ve deployed or class to the cloud we can use the JUnit test to invoke the cloud.

The last step, within the IDE we have been compiling to get the class, but not creating a deployable jar file. We could do this with the IDE but we would also in a real development condition be creating artefacts via a Continuous Integration tooling which will effectively fire the maven command line like interface. So let’s do that to create the jar files, using the following command:

mvn clean package

You should then see a folder created if not already there and a jar file reflecting the values in the POM file, that we can see below.

So we have enough now we could in theory deploy a jar to a weblogic container and fire it from a Unit test. In the next post we’ll deploy and execute the unit test, and throw a crude front end into the mix.

Oracle Maven Repository – Index now available – more to come

23 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Technology

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The support for Maven in the Oracle ecosystem is ever improving as this shows

RedStack

I am happy to announce that we now have an index available for the Oracle Maven Repository. This is a standard Maven index, built with the Maven Core Indexer code (donated by Sonatype to Maven – thanks!) and is available at https://maven.oracle.com/.index/nexus-maven-repository-index.properties and https://maven.oracle.com/.index/nexus-maven-repository-index.gz.

The easiest way to view it is to use an IDE like NetBeans, as shown below:

We are actively working with Maven Repository Manager and IDE teams to make this work for you across a variety of common tools you may use.

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Sending Push Notifications Without Your Own App

24 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle, Technology

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Tags

android, API, app, growl, ios, NMA, prowl, Prowl App, push notifications

So in my opening blog entry I talked about creating mobile push notifications. So before we start playing with cloud solutions and developing anything, the best place to start is be able to push a notification.

We’re going to do this with the use of Prowl. Prowl offers both a mobile application and a cloud service with an API. So setting up an account on Prowl you can connect you mobile Prowl App to then through another app – for example Growl (which is how I came across Prowl) which can be extended by a plugin framework to use Prowl so potentially all your desktop alert can become push notifications if you want.

So if you hadn’t already noticed Prowl is presently an IOS only solution – however there is an Android equivalent called Notify My Android (NMA). I should also be upfront the Prowl App does cost a couple of pounds or dollars (depending upon your App Store). But this is a small price to pay to avoid having to build an app (which needs to you to be a fully paid up IOS Developer Account holder to play with push notifications as we do).

So I will concentrate primarily on working from a Windows platform to an Apple device – but I will loop back to Android at points as well. For those who bulk at the idea of Windows and swear only to live with Mac or a proper OS as many Linux fans will say – I will point out where to get the info you need and hack your Linux flavour into appropriate shape. Our goal is to see Oracle cloud in use.

Just as an aside quick detour – Growl is a Mac based notification consolidation tool, which has a Windows implementation as well called Growl For Windows. The idea is all your applications and system notifications go via Growl which allows your to customise the notifications and route them to lots of different channels such as to browser plugin, push notifications and so on.

So lets get the first steps called out:

Create an account on Prowl or NMA
Install the Prowl App on your IOS device
From the Prowl web app or NMA web send a message to your device

So we have proven notifications to our device from a central device. We are going to go one step further and use a local client to prove we can safely send events to the Prowl or NMA servers. We can do this several different ways – on the Prowl site are several browser plugins that you could use or combine prowl with Growl or Growl for Windows plus the Growl notifier.

So I assume that you have installed Growl or Growl for Windows as previously mentioned. Then the Growl notifier extension needs to be installed from http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/help/growlnotify.aspx. With the extension installed we need to make sure Growl sends its notifications to Prowl and send the notifications from a command line.

To do this you need to create a API Key on the Prowl website. Then in settings part of the app setup the key details as shown below (note I’ve hidden my account and key):

So this links the credentials of the account. You could impose local security constraints so the local notification is only accepted by Growl with good credentials.

Then you you need to configure the notifier to use the configured key as you can see below:

In The Network part of Growl’s configuration you need to establish the Key

The Plus key you can see provides a dialogue like the following where you select the type of notification and then complete the necessary details i.e. copy in the API Key from the website:

In The Network part of Growl’s configuration you need to establish the Key

You’ll may have noticed – that the key name carries through from the website – this is more to make it convenient to track the key rather than a necessity.

With the API Key setup we can link the notification side of things via the Notifications section. You’ll note the App extension is selected and in the notification type I have gone to the Choices menu which provides a popup

Selecting the key:

The final step is to then run a command line, which would look something like:

You’ll notice the command line is very simple as we’ve not setup an security in Growl the only security is around the API Key.

Then we get the pay off of the pushed notification and you can see your notification history as well in the Prowl app – as this shows:

So the steps just performed:

Created the API key on the ProwlAPI site
made sure we’ve got Growl and Growl Notifier installed
Established the link from Growl to Growl Web App via the API Key
Configured the notifications for GrowlNotifier to go through Growl and get pushed onto the Prowl API
Run the command line script
Seen the command line message go from the desktop shell through Growl onto the Prowl API and arrive on your smart phone.

Summary
So we have shown we can create push notifications without the distraction of building our own app. Not very exciting as we haven’t created anything but does show the art of the possible.

Next post we’ll cut some code to perform the same process using the Prowl API directly.