OpenEBS provides a Kubernetes native distributed storage solution which is friendly on developers and administrators. It is completely open source and part of the CNCF. Previously I wrote about installing and using OpenEBS, Jiva storage engine, on the Charmed Kubernetes distribution of Canonical. The Jiva storage class uses storage inside managed […]
Production-like Kubernetes on your laptop. Kubespray on KVM
There are various options to install a production-like Kubernetes distribution on your laptop. Previously I tried out using the Canonical stack (Juju, MAAS, Charmed Kubernetes) for this. This worked nicely but it gave me the feeling that it was a bit Canonical specific and it felt a bit heavy on resources at […]
Anchore Engine: Container image vulnerability scanning
Applications nowadays, are usually deployed inside containers. A container consists of libraries and tools which allow the application to run inside. Since there can be exploitable vulnerabilities, it is not only important to take security into account for your application, but also for the container it runs in. There are […]
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Vault Service to generate, manage and encrypt & decrypt using Keys
The Vault service lets you create vaults in your tenancy as containers for encryption keys and secrets. Vaults are logical entities where the Vault service creates and durably stores keys and secrets. The type of vault you have determines features and functionality such as degrees of storage isolation, access to […]
Introducing OCI Data Integration – New cloud native, serverless service for ETL/ELT and Data Pipelines
TL;DR: Oracle offers a new cloud native, serverless service on OCI for data processing and ETL/ELT, called Data Integration. It seems a new incarnation of Oracle Data Integrator or even of Warehouse Builder. It provides data flows that can filter, convert, join and aggregate. It currently only supports Object Storage […]
Write debug level logs on error – print detailed logging only in exceptional circumstances
TL;DR: Collect debug information in an in-memory buffer that is printed to the output when an error occurs (and quietly discarded in all other cases). I may have come up with a useful idea. Or something that is not all that useful. Or even something that already exists (and I […]
Connect Azure Pipelines with sonarcloud through maven (YAML)
Introduction Sonarcloud is a static code analysis tool. This means that it checks out the code at your repository, does an analysis and shows you the results. It may look something like this: It gives detailed information about your code and you can for example let it scan if you […]
Example of OCI Function as Resource Principal [enabled] to invoke OCI services
![Example of OCI Function as Resource Principal [enabled] to invoke OCI services](https://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image-18-768x285.png)
Resource Principal is an OCI resource that through its membership of a Dynamic Group and permissions granted through policies to the Dynamic Group is given access to OCI resources and services. Examples of Resource Principals are Function and API Gateway. A Function that is resource principal enabled can for example […]
Multiple products, one scrum team: Advantages and disadvantages of a multiproduct scrum team
Introduction According to the scrum guide, scrum is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value. This process framework is used and has proven its value since the early 1990s. The basis of the scrum framework is […]
OBS Studio + Snap Camera: Putting yourself in your presentation live for free!
When giving online presentations, it helps for personal marketing if people can see you on the screen. Various tools provide features which help you achieve that, for example Microsoft Teams. Sometimes though you do not have that available or want to be able to do more than what the tool […]
Quickest route to Your First Handson Experience with GraalVM – Katacoda Scenario with live environment and step by step tutorial
TLDR: This Katacoda Scenario has a live runtime environment with GraalVM 20.1 prepared for you including an easy to click-through step by step scenario that does a live demonstration of most aspects of GraalVM (modern Java runtime, Ahead of Time compilation to native executable, polyglot runtime platform and the platform […]
Reading Query Parameters in GET requests to Project Fn Functions (and Oracle Functions as a Service)
TLDR: query parameters can be retrieved from the Fn-Http-Request-Url header in the ctx parameter passed by Fn to the Node function handling the request; using url.parse() on that header retrieves the url query parameters Project Fn is an open source container native serverless framework. Project Fn provides a runtime […]
Azure Pipelines: publish to Azure Artifacts
This article is a follow-up to my previous article about using Azure Artifacts for own NPM modules. In that article I showed how to create a NPM module by hand on your local system and publish it to Azure Artifacts. But now we like to integrate it into CI/CD, so […]
AWS Shop example: Amazon X-Ray
Introduction We are in production with our shop example [1]. We’d like to get some statistics about our implementation: how often are the Lambda functions called? How fast are they? Of course, we could use the statistics from the performance test, but there is a faster way. This faster way […]
Using Azure Artifacts for your own NPM modules
Currently I am working on a customer project in which we build a lot of Azure (serverless) functions, mostly in Javascript. Sometime ago we foresaw that we need some shared functionality which was to be used in multiple functions. So wouldn’t it be a good idea to create some shared […]
AWS Shop example: SNS duplicate messages
Introduction Our shop example [1] is now in production, wohoo!!! When you are using our example program in production, you might see that some sales are updated multiple times in the database. This will not happen very often, but you want your sales to be processed once, not twice. In […]
Productivity Boosting features in Windows 10
I ran into a valuable 17 minute YouTube movie with tips over some useful Windows 10 features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do06MPWf9E4 I created this short list as a personal reminder: Virtual Desktop – multiple desktop pages for different circumstances (per customer, technology, work and private, for specific demos or recording webinars) (Windows + […]
Composing a Video from multiple sources (MP4, PowerPoint, image, text) using OBS
Videos are a powerful way of communicating a message. I have always been more inclined to write blog articles to share my findings. Recently I was introduced to OBS – Open Broadcaster Software. This free tool makes it fairly easy – for me too – to record videos and combine […]
AWS Shop example: step functions
Introduction When you follow along in this series [1], you might have been irritated by the amount of work to test your functions. It isn’t a problem to test only the unit test for the accept function, but when you have to test the unit test for the decrypt function, […]
How I create multi-layer videos with talking head, slides, sound and simple effects with OBS Studio
Using videos to announce events, explain complex topics, draw attention to causes and entertain community members is powerful. Until recently, I did not create any videos. Too hard. Requiring complex, expensive equipment. That was my thinking. Until recently a colleague introduced me to OBS Studio – Open Broadcaster Software. With […]
AWS Shop example: Smoke and performance tests
Introduction In the previous blog, I talked about unit tests of the AWS Shop example [1]. Today, I will continue with a smoke test and a performance test. Smoke test When you follow along, you will have seen the smoke test several times: we used a smoke test from the […]
The Six-part REAL Oracle Cloud platform Webinar Series – Cloud Native Live Demo and Hands-On Oracle Developer Meetup sessions – kicking off June 10th 2020
Attend this series of six live webinars to get going with cloud native application development on the Oracle Cloud platform, created and presented by REAL specialists. The Red Expert Alliance (aka REAL) is a network of Oracle partners on four continents that have joined forces to share knowledge and experience […]
OpenEBS: Create persistent storage in your Charmed Kubernetes cluster quick and easy!
As a developer I wanted to experiment with Kubernetes environments which approximate production deployments. In order to do that I wanted a distributed storage solution and chose OpenEBS. Mainly because it was easy to get started and quick to get up and running. In this blog post I’ll describe how […]
AWS Shop example: unit tests
Introduction In the last six blogs [1], I showed you an application that used AWS to process the sales from a cashing machine. This series continues with tests for this application. Some objects of our solution cannot be tested: we cannot test the API gateway, the SNS topics or DynamoDB […]
Interesting new features in PowerPoint to make presentations more attractive and effective
PowerPoint is one of the applications I use the most. I create presentations with architecture solution designs, for training purposes, to use in conference sessions next to live demo and in many other cases where a visualization of ideas comes in handy. I am quite keen to learn about new […]
Charmed Kubernetes on KVM using MAAS and Juju
Coming to this solution was a journey. I was looking for a Kubernetes installation which was easy to deploy and cleanup on my own laptop (I didn’t want to have to pay for a hosted solution). I did want a solution which was more or less production-like because I wanted […]
Create video recording in Microsoft Teams with green screen chromakey background without an actual green screen
If you record yourself in front of a green screen – or giant sheet or curtain – you can then manipulate the video and have any picture, movie, drawing or other visual replace the green in the video. A trick commonly used by reporters who do not actually want to […]
A Quick how-to RMAN backup to OCI Object Storage
This is a quick how-to article on setting up RMAN to backup to Object Storage on OCI. This is applicable when you build your on Oracle database on an OCI instance, or when you have a database on-premise you wish to backup to the (OCI) cloud.
AWS Shop example: API Gateway (2)
Introduction Last time, I talked about the API Gateway [1]. The URL that we used last time has randomness in it: it looks like https://54dwcigu3a.execute-api.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/prod/shop. When you destroy the API Gateway objects and redeploy them, you will get another URL. That’s not nice: we don’t want to change the URL […]
AWS Shop example: the API Gateway (1)
Introduction You might have noticed that we skipped the API Gateway up to now [1]. I will write two blogs about the API Gateway. In this one, we follow the simplest route: from sending the message to the API gateway, and let the API Gateway deliver the message at the […]
Migrating databases using Dataguard, some pitfalls and observations
My customer needed to migrate to a new set of datacenters, and while other services were able to “lift and shift”, the Oracle RAC database servers had to be rebuilt in the new datacenter because the underlying platform wasn’t able to migrate the shared disks. Fortunately the environment was already […]
ADF Performance Monitor: Thread Wait and Blocked Time
Last week we had a new version of the ADF Performance Monitor available – version 9.5. In this blog I will write on one of the new features; thread wait and thread blocked time of requests. Sometimes we cannot explain a poor performance, disruptions, hiccups. If we dive into the […]
Windows Sandbox with Chocolatey, Scoop, Git, VisualStudio Code and more
I recently wrote an article to introduce Windows Sandbox. I explained how the Sandbox can have folders mapped from the host, have network interactions with the host (and the rest of the world) and use the clipboard for exchanging objects to and from the host. I also mentioned the logon […]
AWS Shop: DynamoDB, the AWS NoSQL database
Introduction The ultimate goal of our shop application [1] is to update the AMIS-shop table in the DynamoDB service. In this blog, I will tell a little bit more about DynamoDB. DynamoDB is the NoSQL solution of AWS. The way we use this table in our example is straightforward: the […]
Deploy Angular and Node.js webapp in Azure Pipelines (part 5)
In the previous article I explained how to set up multiple environments for Azure Pipelines. In this article I will explain how you can deploy the artifacts to the on-premise VM’s. This are the artifacts you build in the pipeline. I am using an template for this, because we are […]
On-premise VM’s and Azure Pipelines: Set up with multiple stages in Azure Pipelines (part 4)
In the previous article we discussed how we can build a pipeline and at some tests to it. In this article we’re going to discuss how we can set up the on-premise VM’s so that we can deploy the artifacts to them. You can also deploy the artifacts to an […]
AWS Shop: about the AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Introduction Today [1] we’ll look at the AWS Simple Notification Service. We have two of them in our shop: one to get messages from the accept-lambda function and send them to the decrypt-Lambda function, and the decrypt-Lambda function will send the decrypted sales information via SNS to the process-Lambda. The […]
Add tests for Angular and Node.js webapp in Azure Pipelines (part 3)
In the previous article I showed how to build a webapp in the Azure pipeline. In this article I will explain to you how you run tests in your pipeline. I will show you how to do this for both Angular and Node.js. Adding tests frontend – Angular Adding tests […]
Creating a re-usable Vagrant Box from an existing VM with Ubuntu and k3s (with the Kubernetes Dashboard) and adding mysql, using Vagrant and Oracle VirtualBox
In a previous article, I shared with you the steps I took, to get k3s installed (with the Kubernetes Dashboard) on top of an Ubuntu guest Operating System within an Oracle VirtualBox appliance, with the help of Vagrant. [ https://technology.amis.nl/2020/01/15/rapidly-spinning-up-a-vm-with-ubuntu-and-k3s-with-the-kubernetes-dashboard-on-my-windows-laptop-using-vagrant-and-oracle-virtualbox/] For training and demo purposes, I wanted to add mysql […]
Quick and easy: A multi-node Kubernetes cluster on CentOS 7 + QEMU/KVM (libvirt)
Kubernetes is a popular container orchestration platform. As a developer understanding the environment in which your application is going to run is important since this can help you use available services of the platform and fix issues. There are several options to run Kubernetes locally to get some experience with […]