Secure browsing using a local SOCKS proxy server (on desktop or mobile) and an always free OCI compute instance as SSH server

Maarten Smeets

Oracle provides several services as ‘always free’. In contrast to Azure and Amazon, these include compute instances which remain ‘forever’ free to use. Although there are some limitations on CPU, disk, network resources, these instances are ideal to use as a remote SSH server and with a little effort a […]

Java Microservices: What do you need to tweak to optimize throughput and response times?

Maarten Smeets 1

Performance tuning usually goes something like followed: a performance problem occurs an experienced person knows what is probably the cause and suggests a specific change baseline performance is determined, the change is applied, and performance is measured again if the performance has improved compared to the baseline, keep the change, […]

Minikube on KVM on Linux Mint 19.1

Maarten Smeets

In a previous blog post I wrote about running Minikube on Windows. I ended with the suggestion that getting Minikube working might be much easier on Linux. Thus I installed Linux Mint (as dual-boot) on my laptop and gave it a shot. The steps I took to get it working […]

Securing Oracle Service Bus REST services with OAuth2 client credentials flow (without using additional products)

Maarten Smeets 5

OAuth2 is a popular authentication framework. As a service provider it is thus common to provide support for OAuth2. How can you do this on a plain WebLogic Server / Service Bus without having to install additional products (and possibly have to pay for licenses)? If you just want to […]

Application Container Cloud Service (ACCS): Using the Application Cache from a Spring Boot application

Maarten Smeets

Spring Boot allows you to quickly develop microservices. Application Container Cloud Service (ACCS) allows you to easily host Spring Boot applications. Oracle provides an Application Cache based on Coherence which you can use from applications deployed to ACCS. In order to use the Application Cache from Spring Boot, Oracle provides […]

10 reasons NOT to implement Blockchain now

Maarten Smeets 2

A secure distributed ledger with smart contract capabilities not requiring a bank as an intermediary! Also a single source of truth with complete traceability. Definitely something we want! Blockchain technology promises to make this possible. Blockchain became famous through cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The technology could also be considered […]