Tag Archives: OCI

Demo Fluentd using Ubuntu with optional inclusion of OpenSearch and OCI Log Analytics

17 Wednesday Aug 2022

Posted by in Cloud, development, Fluentd, General, Oracle, Technology

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One of the areas I present publicly is the use of Fluentd. including the use of distributed and multiple nodes. As many events have been virtual it has been easy to demo everything from my desktop – everything is set up so I can demo things very easily. While doing this all on one machine does point to how compact and efficient Fluentd is as I can run multiple instances concurrently it does undermine distributed capabilities somewhat.

Add to that I now work for Oracle it makes sense to use OCI resources. With that, I have been developing the scripts to configure Ubuntu VMs to set up the demo environments installing Ruby, Fluentd, and various gems needed and pulling the relevant configurations in. All the assets can be found in the GitHub repository https://github.com/mp3monster/logging-demos. The repository readme includes plenty of information as well.

While I’ve been putting this together using OCI, the fact that everything is based on Ubuntu should mean it can be run locally on VMs, WSL2, and adaptable for MacOS as well. The environment has been configured means you can still run on Ubuntu with a single node if desired.

Additional Log Destinations

As the demo will typically be run on OCI we can not only run the demo with a multinode setup, we have extended the setup with several inclusion files so we can utilize OCI services OpenSearch and OCI Log Analytics. If you don’t want to use these services simply replace the contents of several inclusion files including files with the contents of the dummy_inclusion.conf file provided.

Representation of the Demo setup

The configuration works by each destination having one or two inclusion files. The files with the postfix of label-inclusion.conf contains the configuration to direct traffic to the respective service with a configuration that will push log events at a very high frequency to the destination. The second inclusion file injects the duplication of log events to each service. The inclusion declarations in the main node Fluentd config file references an environment variable that should provide the path to the inclusion file to use. As a result, by changing the environment variable to point to a dummy file it becomes possible o configure out the use of one of the services. The two inclusions mean we can keep the store declarations compact and show multiple labels being used. With the OpenSearch setup, we have a variant of the inclusion file model where the route inclusion can reference the logic that we would use in the label directly within the sore declaration.

The best way to see the use of the inclusions is to experiment with setting the different environment variables to reference the different files and then using the Fluentd dry-run feature (more on this in the book).

Setup script

The setup script performs a number of tasks including:

  • Pulling from Git all the resources needed in terms of configuration files and folders
  • Retrieving the necessary plugins against the possibility of their use.
  • Setting up the various environment variables for:
    • Slack token
    • environment variables to reference inclusion files
    • shortcut environment variables and aliases
    • network (IP) address for external services such as OpenSearch
  • Setting up a folder for OCI tokens needed.
  • Setting up temp folders to be used by OCI Plugins as a file-based cache.

Using OpenSearch

OpenSearch setup is documented in a tutorial here, and a Reference Architecture at the time of writing there isn’t a one-click deploy Terraform available in the Oracle Reference Architecture library on GitHub.

Currently, the setup for OpenSearch means manually adding the node1 index into the configuration.

Useful Links:

Log Analytics

Feeding the log analytics service is a more complex process to set up as the feeds need to have metadata about the events being ingested. The downside is the configuration effort is greater, but the payback is that it becomes easier to extract meaningful information quickly because the service has a greater understanding of the content. For example, attributing the logs to a type of source means the predefined or default log formats are immediately understood, and maximum meaning can be retrieved from the log event.

Going to OCI Log Analytics does cut out the need for the Connections hub, which would allow rules and routing to be defined to different OCI services which functionally can help such as directing log events to PagerDuty.

Useful Links

Demo Enhancements to come

There are a few things we’re planning to do with the demo:

  • Create a terraform script to perform all the environment setup
  • Integrate the configuration script into the terraform
  • Provide some simple dashboard insights for OpenSearch – currently, this is all manual
  • Basic setup for OCI Log Analytics

Testing Terraform

26 Tuesday Jul 2022

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Infrastructure as Code (IaC) should be treated the same way as any other code. That is to say that we should be considering configuration management, testing, regression, code quality, and coverage. We should be addressing these points for the same reasons we address them with our application code. Such as ensuring that we don’t introduce bugs as things evolve and develop, ensuring that the code is maintainable over a prolonged period etc.

The problem is that the only real way to test IaC is to run it. Particularly with the likes of Terraform where it is largely declarative rather than containing a lot of logic. This point is nicely conveyed by Yevgeniy Brikman’s presentation (below)

The presentation goes on to illustrate Terratest which has the look and feel of JUnit or any other xUnit test framework. Terratest is implemented in Golang, But to be honest, given the nature of Terraform ( largely declarative meaning it enables ideas of composition and not sophisticated logic) it means the writing of the tests isn’t going to demand anything clever like how to achieve polymorphic behavior through Go’s type structures.

While Yevgeniy focussed on testing by invoking an application on the infrastructure deployed something we’ve described though our Platform Test logic (more here). You may wish to test things further by interrogating infrastructure components. For example, do I have the right number of nodes in a dynamic group or are container or server logs going into the cloud monitoring services.

Performing such checks is very easy with OCI as it provides a Golang SDK making it very easy to write tests that can call the OCI APIs and interrogate the setup. Better still when considering whether the Terraform configuration will behave correctly to support dynamic/auto-scaling can be done easily without modifying the Terraform configurations as part of the Terratest logic can include Go API calls to temporarily modify scaling triggers or invoking code that can stimulate OCI dynamic features.

Testing App Configuration

There is an interesting question to be considered. There is a point of separation between when to use Terraform (or Pulumi and others for that matter) and tools better suited to application deployment and configuration like Ansible and Chef. Therefore should we separate the testing of these details? Maybe I am too purist but seeing local and remote execs in Terraform as these actions are very opaque and can be used to conceal things or unwittingly depend on the way Terraform handles its dependency graph.

Of course, Ansible has its test framework ansible_test and has the means to measure test coverage. So one possibility is to treat Ansible as a separate module, independently test it, and then integrate its use in the wider picture of deploying infrastructure.

Railroad diagram for OCI Policies

01 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by in General, Oracle, Technology

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I’ve been a fan of Railroad syntax diagrams for a long time. I’ve always found them an easy way to understand the syntactical options and the reserved/keywords in an efficient manner.

Example of Railroad Syntax diagram

I have been digging around in the documentation to find a keyword in the OCI Policies syntax that the common cases don’t use. After a bit of rooting around, I found what I needed. But a Railroad representation would have helped me get the expression correct effortlessly and without so much effort.

The policy documentation can be found at:

Once I solved my problem, I decided to see if I could find something that could easily create the railroad diagrams and encountered a fantastic bit of code on GitHub from Tab Atkins Jr. It’s a neat bit of JavaScript, which can even be run from their GitHub pages – go here. Tab has taken the time to document the tool well, so working out the syntax to define the diagram is straightforward (not that you need to read it much as the tool is well written).

The following diagrams show the syntax for writing OCI Policies in a single image and with the full syntax broken into 2 images to make it a little easier to read on the screen. But also address the fact often you don’t need the Where clause.

If the diagrams need to be updated the source to use with the tools is in my GitHub repository. But a really cool feature of the utility is that the information to populate the editor view is included in the URL (does make for a long URL) but it means this link will take you directly to the view & editor if you want to tinker with the definition. So the links are:

Single diagram View

OCI Policies syntax

Split (2 Part) View

1st part of the expression – not optional
2nd Part covers the Where clause

GitHub Actions on OCI

29 Monday Nov 2021

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Today was the first run of some new presentation material looking at the use of GitHub Actions using Runners deployed on OCI Free Tier. The presentation was actually physical rather than virtual which was after 2 years of virtual presenting, rather refreshing. Not to mention the UKOUG hosted the event at the Oval Cricket ground, which made for an interesting venue. The example configuration is included in our GitHub OCI Utilities repository (as we use this solution to help validate and test our development work).

The presentation itself (which includes screenshots of the setup of a simple Action and runner) is here, note I have disconnected my Runners, but you will be able to see the Action configuration but if you try to trigger activity through my repository then nothing will happen.

Implementing GitHub Action Handlers (aka Runners) on OCI
Continue reading →

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).

Another post on blogs.oracle.com

19 Monday Jul 2021

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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

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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

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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

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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