Op maandag 20 maart vindt weer een Code Café plaats waarin we tools en technologie bespreken en uitproberen. Tussen 17 en 20.30 staan drie onderwerpen op de agenda, eten we met elkaar en gaat we handson ervaring opdoen met de besproken onderwerpen. Als je het leuk vindt om meer te […]
Lucas Jellema
The team has agreed …– the power of suggested recollection
I am not normally a cynic. I trust people’s good intentions. However, I am a little suspicious when an argument in favor or against a specific way of doing something boils down to: “we, the team, have agreed…” (or various flavors that use decided, concluded etc). It may very well […]
Extending Steampipe OCI Plugin with an OCI resource type table
I have written about Steampipe before. And I have stated how much I like this idea of using SQL to access data on cloud resources (and many other types of resources besides). Data is not only more easily accessible in a SQL select statement than in CLI or API calls, […]
Visual Dashboard on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Apache Superset and Steampipe
In addition to the OCI Console, there are many ways to inspect the status of Oracle Cloud resources – including the OCI CLI, Terraform, Grafana OCI Plugin, REST API, OCI App. The open source tool Steampipe (Select * from Cloud) enables SQL queries to inspect many non-SQL data sources and […]
Analyze and Visualize data from any cloud and anywhere with Apache Superset and Steampipe
Apache Superset is an open source end user tool for analyzing and visualizing data. Dozens of chart types are available out of the box, dashboards can be created, finetuned and shared/published. Superset can work with virtually any SQL data source. (I have recently written an introduction to Superset and created […]
Getting started working with Apache Superset – the open source data exploration and visualization platform
Apache Superset is an open source platform for data exploration and visualization. It can be described as an open, free alternative for Microsoft PowerBI, Tableau, Qlik and Oracle Analytics Desktop. Superset connects (through the SQL Alchemy framework) to dozens of SQL compliant databases and can work with CSV and JSON […]
News Flash: OCI DevOps – Deployment runner for Shell Stage
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DevOps is a service I have written about on several occasions. The OCI DevOps service provides an Artifact Repository, Git Code repositories, Build Pipelines and Deployment Pipelines that know how to interact with the runtime environments OKE, Oracle Functions and Compute VM. The news flash is that […]
Quick to run, free and ephemeral RStudio instance on Gitpod
Triggered by an assignment my son had to do for one of his university courses – and given the fairly light weight laptop we have him work with – I decided to make a cloud based RStudio environment to him. I have worked with Gitpod over the past six months, […]
How Cheppy thrills and acceleraties us at AMIS–and what it does not yet do
ChatGPT is a bit of a “tongue twister” so I will speak of Cheppy. AMIS has a long history of spotting, exploring, embracing and rolling out new concepts and technologies . It something we like doing – a trait of the organisation- and are good at and successful with. That […]
Mont Blanc is [not] the highest mountain–risk of local optimization
The best solution may not be the best solution. Depending on the scope in which you consider the alternatives, you may arrive at the wrong conclusion. Consider only the problem at hand, there may be an apparently easy solution that in the grander scheme of things is not optimal and […]
Five part article series introducing Go on OCI
Go – sometimes Golang because internet searching for just “go” is quite impossible – is a popular programming language. It was initially launched in 2012 and as been gaining popularity ever since. It has embraced many of the good things from other languages including Java and improved on a number […]
OCI Function Parameters based on Vault Secrets–an enhancement request
OCI Functions are powerful components in a cloud native world. Triggered by events and direct requests, these functions are engaged to perform a specific task. Which could be almost anything (as long as it does not take too long). And it can certainly be some task that requires access to […]
Use it .. or lose it. On Application and Feature decommissioning
“Can we let go of that office building?” (we pay rent, utilities, furniture – is that still necessary or justified) “Well, I believe Chris is still making use of that building.” Chris: “my team meets Wednesday morning every other week in one of the conference rooms in that building.” (Chris’ […]
Dynamic Configuration of Terraform plans and Stacks in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Some of the data used by Terraform to create cloud resources is sensitive and should not be stored in plain text in source code repositories. Examples are passwords, client secrets, API tokens. Even though the Terraform configurations are (infrastructure as) code – not every element can be treated as code. […]
Terraform – injecting local and remote Configuration Data
This article describes how a Terraform plan can read configuration data at plan and application time from local or remote JSON documents to provide dynamic, easily and centrally maintainable settings that guide the provisioning process. Terraform variables are static: they are assigned using their default value (which cannot use function […]
Many ways to provision Oracle Cloud Resources using Terraform
Terraform is used for automated provisioning of resource on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Resources are defined in HCL – the DSL used in Terraform for describing infrastructure – and these definitions are processed by the OCI provider for Terraform that turns the definitions into the required calls to the OCI REST […]
Create Terraform Stack and Apply it to Provision Resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Terraform is the tool of choice for automated provisioning of cloud resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (IaC). In two recent articles, I have demonstrated how to create a plan with resource definitions to be processed by the OCI provider for Terraform and how to (re)use a Terraform Module to allow […]
Terraform Modules, For-Each, File Set on Oracle Cloud
The creation of cloud resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is ideally done as Infra as Code using Terraform (plans). No hands need to touch the console, no permissions need to be given to individual users and all actions can be previewed, tested and easily repeated. The support for Terraform in […]
Terraform from Cloud Shell for OCI resource creation through Infra as Code
The creation of cloud resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is ideally done as Infra as Code using Terraform (plans). No hands need to touch the console, no permissions need to be given to individual users and all actions can be previewed, tested and easily repeated. OCI has deep support for […]
Delayed Delivery in OCI Queue Service–time based message release
Messages published to an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Queue may not immediately be intended for consumption. It is a not uncommon requirement to make messages available for consumption only at a specific moment in time, rather than right away. OCI Queue does not currently have built in support for a […]
Generic OCI Resource manipulation with OCI CLI Raw Request
I should have been aware of it – but I was not. The generic OCI CLI Raw Request option – the uniform approach to any OCI resource query or manipulation through OCI CLI. With raw request, each call looks like this: oci raw-request –http-method POST –target-uri API-ENDPOINT/API-PATH/resourcetype/resource-OCID –request-body file://request.json The […]
First Steps with OCI Queue Service–fully managed massively scalable FIFO queue
In an earlier article, I have explored the promise of OCI Queue – a managed queue service launched in December 2022. In this article I will show my first real activities with OCI Queue. Small steps, granted. But surely helpful to give you some idea of what this service is […]
OCI Queue– simple, powerful, heavy duty reliable decoupling
The new OCI Queue Service provides a straightforward offering: publish messages into a persisted store and allow consumers to retrieve these messages from that store – the oldest message first (FIFO). Interaction with OCI Queue can be done through REST API calls or through the STOMP-protocol (the Simple (or Streaming) […]
Quickest way to run a container on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: container instances
Container Instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are VM based environments that can be leveraged as “serverless” container runtimes. Once a container instance has been defined – which is a very simple, rapid procedure – we can specify the container images (OCI – open container initiative – compliant) for which containers […]
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure–flutter of activity: Queue, Container Instances
Over the last few days, in this pre-Holiday season period, Oracle has released a number of interesting new services and updates to existing services. I plan on exploring them in more detail in the coming weeks. (note: the illustration is courtesy of StableDiffusion – using the prompt “a painting of […]
Unified Auditing not possible for Oracle Database XE (Express Edition)
I recently tried to get Unified Auditing going for Oracle Database XE. I could not really find instructions – not even through ChatGPT – and finally reached out to Gerald Venzl, the community champion at Oracle who is one for the key people behind Oracle Database XE. I learned from […]
GitHub Copilot reduces writing Java boilerplate to two simple comments
GitHub Copilot helped me write a Java application to process a CSV file. Not a hard task – though one that in Java always feels much harder than in Python or Node. This time round – because of Copilot – all I have to was write two simple instructions (and […]
Overhead of Service Mesh–measuring and comparing Istio, Linkerd, Kuma and Consul
A Service Mesh can provide many facilities regarding traffic management between microservices – from simple routing and load balancing, producing telemetry to applying complex routing logic and security policies. This layer of logic that is applied on top of what services are doing themselves is not free: additional latency is […]
Run your own instance of Backstage in 3 minutes
Backstage is the Developer Portal Platform that has come out of Spotify and now lives under the CNCF (Cloud Native Compute Foundation) umbrella where it is one of the most popular and active projects. Backstage provides a framework an starting point for what typically evolves into your highly customised developer […]
Running OpenTelemetry Demo in Gitpod Workspace–two click install
Recently the OpenTelemetry project launched a demo application that demonstrates many aspects of instrumentation, metrics and trace gathering, providing insight across multi-service, multi-technology application stacks and in general how to leverage OpenTelemetry. The application architecture for the demo stack looks like this: A front end web application – a web […]
Gitpod workspace for instant Dapr explorations
I have prepared a Gitpod wokspace definition that allows me to start a fresh development environment with the latest release of Dapr (dapr.io) installed as well as supporting containers that provide state store (Redis, MySQL) and Pub/Sub (Redis) capabilities. This environment is a perfect starting point for trying out Dapr, […]
Gitpod for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure development
Gidpod provides ephemeral development environments. Run a Gitpod workspace and get a clean environment with precisely those components that have been configured for the use case or context you need to work in. Everytime a workspace is initialized and everyone who does that, the environment will be exactly the same. […]
Quickly try out Kubernetes with two Pods–web app and database
Two colleagues wanted to try out Kubernetes and more specifically deployment of an application on Kubernetes that was not entirely trivial. One that consists of at least two Pods – one running a database and one running an application. A little internet browsing brought me to a single YAML file […]
Which tools and technologies are new and exciting, proven, growing stale–report from Devoxx 2022
A conference such as Devoxx is a great opportunity to get inspired into trying out tools and technologies that may not or only be vaguely be known as they are mentioned or even demonstrated by presenters or discussed in the hallways of the movie theater where the conference is taking […]
Reflections from Devoxx 2022–on software engineering today
End of day two. So many topics already were presented, demonstrated, discussed, tried out to and by me. This article is just a very brief overview of what caught my attention. And what I will have to look into in more detail – or not in some cases. Containers and […]
One click free browser based Oracle Database environment with Gitpod
This article describes how you can run your very own Oracle Database from your browser using Gitpod. With a free account (50 hours Gitpod use per month), you can open this URL to launch a workspace that contains Oracle Database 21c XE along with VS Code, Oracle Developer Tools extension […]
Booting up–even quite senior – laptops with Ubuntu Linux OS using Rufus
The challenge was as follows: provide a handson workshop environment – consisting of nothing more than a browser connected to our office’s Wifi network – for visitors to the Open Day we organized at my company. However, all I had to work with was a bunch of really old laptops […]
First steps with Gitpod – great for try out, quick open source contributions and for workshops
Gitpod.io is a SaaS for software developers (that can also be used in self-hosted mode on Kubernetes). Gitpod makes workspaces available – typically based on a Git repository – with tools to develop and build software. A workspace is an ephemeral (not long lasting) Linux environment that I can access […]
Oracle Database 23c–new feature highlights (release February 2023?)
Based on the fascinating Twitter thread by Philipp Salvisberg covering the presentation by Gerald Venzl at DOAG 2022 I would like to mention a few of the features that apparently will be part of Oracle Database 23c – the new Long Term Support release (succeeding 19c) that has a beta […]
Oracle Cloud’s marching order: win developers’ hearts and minds
There are two public cloud. AWS and Azure. That is not actually the case – but that is how sometimes it may seem. A third cloud is frequently listed alongside the two main players. A cloud that has made serious efforts to be seen by developers and architects. By somehow […]