Tag Archives: Notifications

OCI Notifications through the LogSimulator

04 Friday Nov 2022

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

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We’ve been busy putting together a number of Oracle Architecture Center assets over the last week. This has included building LogSimulator extensions that can either be run in a very simple manner using just a single file, but limited in the payloads that can be sent to OCI (if you take the appropriate custom file from the LogSimulator you do need to make one minor tweak. But the code has also been added to the Oracle GitHub repository here in a manner that doesn’t require the full tool. There of course a price to pay for the simplified implementation. This comes in the form of the notifications being sent and received being hardwired into the code rather than driven through the insulator’s configuration options.

The decoupling has been done by implementing the interface for the custom methods in a class without the implements declaration, and then we extend the base class and apply the implements declaration at that level.

While notifications could take log events, it is more suited to JSON payloads. But as the simulator can tailor the content being sent using some formatting, it does not care if the provided events to send are pre-formatted as JSON objects making it an easy tool to test the configuration of OCI Notifications.

Unit testing as well

In addition to the new channel, as previously mentioned we have been making some code improvements. To support that we have started to add unit tests, and double checking code will compile under Java. To keep the dependencies down we’re making use of Java assert statements rather than a pretty JUnit. But the implementation ideas are very similar. As the tests use Java asserts the use of asserts does need to be enabled in the command line; for example:

Groovy test.groovy -enableasserts

Notifications from Oracle API Platform Cloud Service

11 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by in API Platform CS, General, Oracle, Technology, tools

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There are circumstances in which notifications from the Oracle API Platform CS could be seen as desirable.  For example, if you wish to ensure that the developers are defining good APIs and not accidentally implementing APIs that hit the OWASP Top 10 for APIs. Then you will probably configure things such that developer users can design the APIs, configure the policies, but only request an API to be deployed.

However, presently notifications through mechanisms such as email or via collaboration platforms such as Slack aren’t available.  But implementing a solution isn’t difficult.  For the rest of this blog we’ll explore how this might be implemented, complete with a Slack implementation.

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More Free Oracle Cloud than you might know

04 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

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free-750x536The news about Oracle offering some free cloud services ‘for life’ is making an impact.  But, the free services don’t end there. The pricing of some other native cloud services includes some free bands. So it’s worth keeping an eye on the fine print. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see limited capacity access in other areas.

Oracle Functions – whilst the core of this service is built on the open-source Fn Project (also largely driven by Oracle) the managed service has a free tier allowing up to 2 million invocations that can consume 400, 000 gigabytes of memory per second use (details can be seen here). Plenty enough to experiment with the concepts behind Serverless aka FaaS capabilities.

Oracle Notifications whilst focussed on the technical side of gathering key event data from OCI and its services, as the document states “sending notifications to numerous interested parties, or even synchronizing the moving parts of a distributed application” – this obviously means a service with characteristics a bit like AWS’ SNS. Like SNS it can be hooked up to email and other HTTPS services using Oracle Events which also has free use. Events is particularly interesting as it is bases the event structure on the CNCF CloudEvents spec. There is an excellent illustration of such a use case in the Oracle blogs here.

It will be interesting to see if we a similar trend with other Oracle cloud-native services. A new take on the now-defunct Application Container Cloud Service (ACCS) would be an ideal vehicle – whether there is sufficient demand for such a capability is not clear (it would in effect be an always live service like a Kubernetes solution, but the simpler, smaller footprint more like Functions in a multi-tenant environment. At the same time, it doesn’t have potential latency of a Function being activated).