Earlier this month as part of the Virtual Oracle Developer Meetups, we were very fortunate to have Oracle Ace, Martien van den Akker present on the subject of the magic of correlations in SOA, BPM, and Oracle Integration Cloud. Martien not only presents to the Oracle community but also is very active on the Oracle community sites (community.oracle.com and Cloud Customer Connect) sharing his wealth of knowledge. When it comes to the tough questions about Oracle middleware tech on these platforms, you stand a good chance that Martien will be the one answering your question.
This insightful presentation not only addressed the traditional Oracle Integration approach using SOA and BPM but also contrasted the capabilities as provided by Oracle Cloud. Martien was generous enough to allow us to record the presentation and share it (below), along with the demo resources from:
With the impact of Covid19 on the Meetup community really hitting, the Oracle Developer Meetups across Europe have got together and gone on-line. We’re several events in now, whilst Lucas Jellema (AMIS) and Rolando Carrasco (SPS) are leading the charge with a great series of sessions focusing Oracle Cloud Native services complete with practical labs.
Today was one of my sessions, whilst I only co-hosted, we got to hear a great presentation with a heart warming story which in this challenging times seems all the more appropriate. Christian McCabe (Steltix) and Filip Huysmans (Contribute) presented on how a multinational hackerthon spanning South Africa to Belgium was put together to only help children of Christel House (a charity who work to provide education to those who would not normally get access to it). Not only was the hackerthon engineered to given the students a chance to learn and experience software development in a pretty realistic context, it also provided the school with some software to help their everyday activities, in this case managing books in their library.
The hackerthon yielded a lot of successful outcomes (Steltix wrote about it here), but, what was really interesting is that whilst working with the school, children and interns (from both Steltix and Contribute) took a lot lessons away as well.
Finally we should thank Geertjan Wielenga who facilitated and supported the development of the hackerthon.
If you want to know more about the virtual meetups then check our meetup page (https://www.meetup.com/Oracle-Developer-Meetup-London) for both virtual events, and when things change so we can all be a lot closer and be sharing pizza again.
I presented at an online Meetup on today (Thursday 16th April) with a shortened version of my API technology overview (A quick look at gRPC, GraphQL, REST APIs – Which way to go?). Aside from an early interruption to the event, the evening was an excellent series of speakers covering a number of API centric subjects.
Whilst the weather may have put some off venturing out, not for our intrepid duo of presenters – Joost Volker (Oracle PM for a Blockchain) and Robert van Mölken Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador and author of Blockchain Across a Oracle who both had to negotiate protesting farmers, traffic jams, flight delays (wrong kind of rain to land in London) and London’s rush hour traffic.
Last night was the London Oracle Developer Meetup’s sessions around observability. Andrei Cioaca with a focus on the use of OpenTracing as provided by Jaeger, in a standard Kubernetes deployment with Istio – realized with Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE). This was followed by my session on another pillar using logging via FluentD. Also incorporated into standard Kubernetes, but also able to support traditional monolithic use cases.
Andrei provided a great overview of the 3 pillars and the strengths and weaknesses of the different pillars. With the basics covered Andrei then dove into the configuration and execution of Istio combined with Jaeger and the corresponding insights available. including a look at the kinds of visual insights that Jaeger and Kiali provide. Some probing conversations followed about the relationship to Spring Cloud Sleuth, Open Zipkin and the OpenTracing as a concept more generally.
Andrei’s presentation material can be found in his GitHub repository here.
Google Analytics on Search Terms
My session followed a pizza break, as there was a delay in its arrival. With everybody having chatted over pizza about OpenTracing, we picked up on FluentD and the Logging aspect to Observability. FluentD, as an open-source project has been growing steadily, and actually baked into several Log Analytics products and services – as the above analytics from Google shows.
The presentation looked at the growing challenges of modern software in terms of making sense of logging. We explored the capabilities of FluentD before drilling into real-world use cases and potential deployment models.
As you’ll see from the slides we ran a couple of demos. The configuration for the demos can be found at https://github.com/mp3monster/fluentd-demos along with an example payload.
This Meetup was put together quickly as it presented an opportunity to align with other events happening in the Oracle offices. Despite the relatively short notice we a turn out that really made great use of our speaker – Sid Joshi who walked through the Enterprise Level patterns supported by Oracle’s Integration Cloud (OIC) including a demo showing how PaaS4SaaS worked using Service Cloud and OIC making use of VBCS and integration (formerly ICS) parts of the API Platform.
As with all the meet-ups we allow the discussions to flow freely. So, the conversation probed different aspects of OIC. So with the follow up on Several Capgemini use cases of OIC that have won the team awards.
As the conversation has focused on OIC and the use cases rather than our ongoing Drones with APIs stories, I have had an interesting follow on discussion about the application of drones. The drone story has many threads. The initial driver for the work on the drone has been about bringing something interesting and distinctive to the meetup. The drone is very tangible, and the source of amusement which makes the meetups a lot more fun.
It’s been a quiet month for this blog, but I’ve been pretty busy with a raft of other activities…
a recent article on our sister site – oracle-integration.cloud on RPA.
I also appear in an interview with K21 Academy here.
Reviewing a new book on Enterprise API Management for Packt which we would very highly recommend if you want to understand the more Enterprise perspectives of adopting APIs, particularly if you’re considering APIs as a potential new revenue stream.
UK Oracle User Group committees for TechFest (having been reviewing the paper submissions it looks like it’s going to be an excellent conference in December) and Southern Summit (next week).
Just launched a number of sessions for the Oracle London Developer Meetup, with another to be announced soon (Blockchain) and potentially two more before the end of the year (we’re working on the speakers now).
As a result of the recent Meetups on the subject of Helidon that have been occurring recently, we made the suggestion that Helidon is the subject of a Groundbreaker’s Podcast, net result I was invited to be part of the panel. The podcast was recorded a few weeks ago, and know available (here). Go check it out, as it includes the key contributors to the project Dmitry Kornilov and Tomas Langer.
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 …
Whilst the weather may have put some off venturing out, not for our intrepid duo of presenters – 
Last night was the London Oracle Developer Meetup’s sessions around observability. 
