I was fortunate enough to record a podcast with the team at Adventures In Dev Ops just before Christmas. The recording has been fine tuned and now available on their web site here. From my perspective, the discussion was really interesting and explored a wide range of areas around the challenges of monitoring.
As the podcast is linked to the book we’re writing for Manning (Unified Logging With Fluentd), there is a discount code currently running – poddevopsadv20.
Thanks to Charles Wood and Jeffrey Groman for having me on as a guest.
Other news …
I will be presenting at the online conference Blueprint LDN, check out the subjects being covered, looks very interesting.
We’ve been told because of current events in the US that this event is going to be rescheduled.
I am pleased to say that I will be talking about Fluentd at the Cloud Native eParty virtual conference on 2nd June 2020. I’ll be presenting at 4pm, and then hanging out on the conference slack channel to answer any more questions people might have.
This year’s UKOUG TechFest 19 conference is over. The first time in a number of years where the user group conference hasn’t been a combined Tech, Apps and JD Edwards event. I have to admit that I was a little concerned with the separation of Tech and Apps as some of the tech stack overlaps for the two groups – for example, Integration Cloud.
That said, the situation being what it was, I got involved with the committee for planning the event including inheriting the stream lead responsibilities for Dev (in the sense of modern development e.g. microservices etc) and what had been historically referred to as middleware (Integration Cloud, Digital Assistant, Helidon, WebLogic) with a lot of support and input from Mark Simpson, Grant Ronald and Susan Duncan.
From my perspective, I don’t think there was a concern (and this isn’t an attempt at being self-congratulatory) as the hard graft is done by the UKOUG office staff.
As the number of people was smaller, we had a smaller venue rather than the ICC in Birmingham or the ACC Convention Centre in Liverpool – which actually worked out well. The problem of the ICC and particularly the ACC is that main community spaces had been very large as a result atmosphere suffered. This time the Grand Hotel in Brighton was really busy and vibrant as a result.
We had a good blend of sessions covering traditional integration, low code, cloud, microservices, API, UI with people from customers, partners and Oracle travelling in from all over Europe and the US to participate and present.
In terms of my presentations and the ones, I managed to see, I’d particularly recommend checking out in the UKOUG library …
I’m pleased to confirm I will be presenting at JAX London over the 3 days of 7th-10th October 2019. where I’ll be talking about Good API Design. If you want to know more check out details here.
Another Spring means another excellent Oracle EMEA PaaS Forum for Oracle partners. Every Year Juergen Kress organizes the event, finding really nice venues to host several hundred people over four and half days.
The event is split into several parts, Monday afternoon normally involves Oracle Ace’s presenting on best practices, insights on applying the various technologies etc. For me this meant presenting on the London Developer Meetup, looking at how it worked, what has been successful, and what hasn’t. For those know have read my blogs on the subject (here) will know about our Drone initiative.
Then Tuesday is a single stream day where Juergen has managed to pull in SVPs and Senior Product Managers from around the globe to provide a high-level view of what has been going on with their products. For anyone consulting in the Oracle domain, this is incredibly useful. For example, there is a clear strategy coalescing around AI and Machine Learning both as a service proposition to users, but also how these technologies are being made available and used within other products. Other areas such as OIC and SOA CS have stability and maturity, and the road map is about maximising connectivity with the newer products.
But before the sessions start, Juergen starts with opening remarks, and demos’ something engaging. In previous years this has been things like Digital Assistants/Chatbots and so on. This year, we have been fortunate to be an active contributor by demoing the drone through the use of APIs and talking about the ideas. The dry runs of the demo on Monday went without a problem, but when it came to the main show, the drone was a little uncooperative – we think because the air-con had really kicked in. But importantly, even not achieving the desired result, the message of engagement made it home.
Wednesday is split into streams with in-depth sessions from the different Product Managers, he amount of insight gained from these sessions is tremendous, some of which is very much protected by safe harbour statements or not for public disclosure such is the honest and open discussions. The day closes with an Ace Director initiative which demonstrates the application of Oracle Cloud products to a plausible use case, and Luis Weir (Capgemini Oracle CTO) is part of. This session has become something of a tradition now.
The day’s business concludes awards, and for a second year the UK Capgemini team have taken home two awards for APIs and PaaS Contribution.
Luis Weir with his API award
The final two days are then a choice of Hackerthon or 1/2 day training sessions on different products with the relevant Product Managers, and an excellent opportunity to pick the brains of the presenters as well as get hands-on experience with the different products.
The week isn’t without it’s social and networking activities of course …
With the start of December comes the UK Oracle User Group conference, or to be more precise the Independent UKOUG. This year the conference is back in Blackpool, a slightly smaller venue than the ICC in Birmingham, but in many respects that made the event feel more vibrant and busy.
The user group also announced some of the changes it is making going forwards reflecting the changing needs of its members – SIGs being largely superseded by multi-stream single day events (Summits) with the Call for Papers for the first of these here. A wider list of Oracle related Calls for Papers is available here.
Of course being a UKOUG Volunteer, I have been presenting and co-presenting. The slides from my presentation sessions can be found at:
This was an abridged version of the an update on my presentation here
My second presentation was a review of Oracle Integration Cloud, in which I presented some customer use cases of OCI as part of a wider presentation on OIC by Sid Joshi.
This was followed on the second day with two API based sessions, the first being a deep dive into custom API Policies on the Oracle API Platform.
The final session, was another short one looking at Apiary which was primarily a demo of what the solution can do.
On top of trying to keep up with my usual workload – a very hectic couple of days.
As we rapidly approach the end of the Year. We’re still pretty busy. The UK Oracle User Group Annual Conference covering Oracle Technology (Tech18) ranging from Database on premises to Polyglot development in Oracle and other clouds passing through Hybrid Integration, SOA and so on. Alongside this is also Apps18 which covers Oracle Applications from EBusiness Suite and Seibel to the Fusion cloud solutions such HCM, Financials, Taleo and so on. Then finally the 3rd part covering all things JDEdwards.
Being on the committee for the conference means that I have been heavily involved in developing the conference agenda and choosing sessions. So I can say with great confidence that there is a very diverse range of sessions from highly respected SMEs and presenters along with new blood presenting on subjects from Oracle JET to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for example.
The call for papers for the U.K. Oracle User Group’s 2018 Conference in December is out. The committee are looking for papers across not just core Oracle technologies like the database and SOA Suite but newer technologies such as Event Hub. With Oracle’s engagement with developers and the commitment to open source the UKOUG has moved to engage with these users as well. So the committee will welcome submissions about open source tech that maybe run on an Oracle platform. You can submit your proposals here.
If you’re considering making a submission but want some advise or suggestions then reachout to the UKOUG and its committee members – contact details are here.
We look forward to seeing you in Liverpool in December.
It seems that it becoming common for people to write a personal review of the year. If you’re old school Christmas Card sort then it gets printed and put in the card. If you’re a bit more hip then it’s a Facebook post. For those trendier than that, who knows?
Anyway, I thought I’d use my blog to reflect on what has happened and what we hope to be upto in 2018.
So the big headlines for us …
1st book published as a co-author about ICS, started another book project which should be finished in 2018.
Packt have been talking to me about another book project (even though my contribution to book 2 not yet finished!) Have to admit what is being suggested is intriguing and a bit different
Then there was the UKOUG Journey to the Cloud event. Having been postponed because of venue flooding it was good to see this happen. Not to mention it being one of s number of events I have presented at this year.
We attended and presented at the Oracle EMEA Partner Conference for the 1st time and presented with my co-author on ICS.
Contributions to supporting the UKOUG as part of a SIG committee member, reviewed for Oracle Scene. Being involved in a SIG committee also meant helping plan the conference.
Writing hasn’t just been about the books, we continue to write our own blog posts, content for Oracle-integration.cloud plus several journals including Oracle Technology Network,
Presenting at Oracle Open World for the 1st time, and signing copies of our book on ICS
Promoted from an Oracle Ace Associate to a full Oracle Ace.
So where will 2018 take us, well somethings we’re confident of …
Wrapping up my contribution to the API Platform book
I’ve just come to the end of a very busy 25 hours at the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) Conference in Birmingham. Four presentations – interestingly the same subject area, that of Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) / Integration Cloud Service (ICS) started and ended the day. Between this we also covered some approaches to start working towards Microservices in a Monolith World and Oracle Messaging Cloud.
Below are the presentations on the Microservices and ICS/OIC. The piece on Oracle Messaging Cloud was largely demo based, so rather than sharing the presentation slides, which won’t tell you too much. The best way to find out about this is to read the 2 articles about the capability in the OraWorld magazine (issues 6 & 7). With issue 7 perfectly timed by becoming available in the last couple of days.
With the Oracle Messaging Cloud article, there is one word of caution. When the article was written and submitted I used a free cloud service (which using contemporary terminology we’d describe as Serverless) called WebScript.io. The WebScript piece served to make it easy to consume the webservice calls illustrating the PushListener feature. This service however is being closed down – a shame as it was an elegantly simple solution. Given this I am currently working on a blog post which will show how another services can take the place of WebScript.io; whilst not finalised, this maybe Google Cloud Functions.
If this wasn’t enough we also squeezed in the keynote presentations, a meeting with several other contributors to OMESA (Open Modern Enterprise Software Architecture) , a lunch conversation with our Publisher (Packt) and several other Oracle book authors, Oracle Ace dinner (great food with a lot of brilliant & friendly people), some very valuable incidental conversations and some work for a customer.
Microservices in a Monolith World
Look at Oracle Integration Cloud – its relationship to ICS. Customer use Cases an Insight into why ICS
This year’s 
