Last week I passed for my RHCSA exam (EX200) [1]. While I was studying for the exam, I asked myself which parts of this exam are still relevant when you use Linux servers and Linux containers in the cloud and which parts are not. Assumptions In the cloud, we prefer: […]
Cloud
Steampipe–analyze data from cloud, file, platform, IaC using SQL queries
In our daily work we are dealing with data from many sources. Data in CSV files, from Cloud APIs, in mail servers, configuration files, Terraform plans, in logging systems, source code repositories and many more. Different formats, access methods, tools. And retrieving data from one such source can be challenging […]
AMIS DataSafe, the answer to Black Swan scenarios
How to be prepared for a black swan scenario?
Getting started (again) with Kubernetes on Oracle Cloud
For many of my recent activities, I have not worked with or even on (knowingly at least) Kubernetes. So for many months I have not touched my OKE cluster on Oracle Cloud. However, in the last weeks, I have run into so many interesting things to dive into – that […]
Creating, Building and Invoking a Function on OCI with Terraform
Automation through infrastructure as code is the name of the game. And I am a player in that game. In the last few weeks I have spent a lot of time on creating resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Through the console, using Terraform and the Resource Manager and Stacks, with […]
OCI DevOps Deployment Pipeline for Functions–automation on Oracle Cloud
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a free DevOps cloud service that includes build and deploy pipelines in addition to source code and artifact repositories. I have written about OCI DevOps Deployment Pipelines and its Build Pipelines in earlier articles. In this article, I will show you a deployment pipeline on OCI […]
How to open IDCS Console from OCI– Finding the entry to Identity Cloud Service
I have just spent way too much time on finding the way to the Oracle IDCS console from within my OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) console. I was reading a bunch of interesting articles on using IDCS to protect access to OCI Functions and I was trying to follow along. However, […]
OCI DevOps–Build Pipelines and Code Repositories for CI
This article introduces Build Pipelines and Code Repositories in OCI DevOps (released on October 26th 2021) – complementing the Artifact Registry and Deployment Pipelines that were first launched in July of 2021 and that I discussed in this article. Build [ing software] is an apparently clear indication of a specific […]
OCI DevOps–Free Automated Cloud Native Application Deployment to Oracle Cloud
Deployment is a term used frequently and often casually in software engineering. A term that for a long time was a bit cryptic to me. What exactly is deployment and what steps does it entail? Why is it apparently so hard? What help do deployment tools offer? And what is […]
Continuous Generation and Publication of Docstring Documentation on Azure – using Sphinx, Pydoc, Storage Account and App Service
In this blog I will explain how to generate static HTML pages from your projects Pydoc (docstring) comments with Sphinx. Then we are going to host it in an Azure Web App so that everyone in your team is able to access it. Because we use a Storage Mount, when […]
How to use single sign on between multiple OCI environments
Since we provide support for several clients in OCI, we regularly need to login into different OCI-tenancies. How nice would it be to have Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality between these different customer environments. Just 1 credential for all environments, granting and revoking access a lot easier. Also no need to […]
Implementing Serverless Multi Client Session Synchronization with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
TL;DR – Multi Client Sessions can be facilitated in a fully serverless fashion. Two players playing Tic Tac Toe or Chess, teams collaborating on a document or diagram, an audience witnessing a presenter’s demonstration – these are just examples where multiple distributed application instances should be kept in synch. This […]
GitHub Actions: A first impression
I’m a regular user of GitHub. Recently I discovered GitHub also has a build-in CI/CD workflow solution called GitHub Actions. Curious about how this would work I decided to try it out. I had previously build a Jenkins Pipeline to perform several static and dynamic application security tests on a Java project […]
Performance problems, the Whys.. and Hows.. around them
Introduction Over the last years, as part of my consultancy experience, I had the chance to work on several assignments tackling IT performance problems. In this post I will try to share my experiences on that topic, considering performance problems that I have faced on several (on-premise, cloud, hybrid) and […]
AWS Migration part 3: The technique behind Windows Failover Cluster on AWS
Introduction In the previous two blogs [1], I showed that it is is possible to implement a Windows Failover Cluster in AWS. In this blog, I will explain the differences between a Failover Cluster on-premise and a Failover Cluster in AWS. 1. How does a Windows Failover Cluster work on-premise? […]
Windows Failover Cluster Migration to AWS part 2: installation
Introduction In the previous blog [1] I showed the different solutions that there are to migrate an on-premise Windows Failover Cluster environment to AWS. I also showed how fast (or how slow) the failover of a node takes. I assume you might want to see how this works for yourself. […]
AWS Migration part 1: how to migrate Windows Failover Clustering servers to AWS?
Introduction In this series, I will look at the migration from on-premise Windows Failover Clusters to AWS. What is the difference in recovery times between the application on-premise, the 1:1 migration of a Failover Cluster to AWS and the commonly used pattern of an Auto Scaling Group with one node? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: 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 […]
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 […]
AWS shop example: Lambda
Introduction In the previous blog [1], I wrote about an example shop application in AWS. Let me show the AWS architecture of this shop again: In this blog, I will tell a little bit more about the Lambda functions in this shop example. Lambda functions are serverless functions: you don’t […]
A Free Apache Kafka Cloud Service – and how to quickly get started with it
Last week I presented on Apache Kafka – twice. Once to a group of over 100 students, once to 30+ colleagues. In both instances, I invited attendees to partake in a workshop with hands-on labs to get acquainted with Apache Kafka. I had prepared a Docker Compose based Kafka platform […]
Example application in AWS using Lambda
Introduction I have to admit: I love serverless. Serverless computing is using the cloud as it is supposed to be used: it scales up when you need more capacity, it scales down to zero when you don’t need resources. That is really good when you have, for example, a shop […]
Migrating an old (10.2.0.4) database to Oracle Cloud with minimal downtime
Unlike most of our posts this post will contain almost no code or examples. But it hopefully will help somebody who ends up to be in the same situation we landed on: migrating data from very old versions to a new environment. Recently we were tasked with the migration of […]
Policies in AWS (2)
Yesterday I published a blog about AWS policies. We used the IAM wizard to create a policy. When you try to use this policy with the users we created, you will get errors like these when you go to ECS, and try to create (for example) an ECS-cluster: This is […]
Creating policy’s, groups and users in AWS
Today, I’ll demonstrate how you can add policy’s, groups and users within AWS. In a couple of days, I’ll demonstrate the use of AWS Elastic Container Services (ECS) to a group of people. After the demonstration, they can play with ECS themselves. It is, of course, not the intention to […]
Using bindings to connect Azure Functions to Azure Queue Storage
Recently I started working in the Azure Cloud and I would like to share an example I worked on that helped me understand the possibilities of this cloud environment. The focus for this article is using Azure Functions and Input and Output bindings to the Azure Queue Storage. The business […]
Loading Data into Always Free Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud – from JSON and CSV to Database Table
In a number of recent articles, I have described how to provision an instance of Oracle Data Warehouse Cloud in Oracle Cloud’s Always Free tier. I have also described how to connect both SQL Developer and Data Visualization Desktop to this ADW instance. In this article, we take this one […]
Oracle Data Visualization Desktop Connecting to Oracle Cloud Always Free Autonomous Database
Oracle Cloud now offers the Always Free Tier that comes with an always free Autonomous Data Warehouse (up to 20 GB data storage) as well as an free Autonomous Database for Transaction Processing. In an earlier article, I described how to provision your own Free Autonomous Data Warehouse in Oracle […]
Connect local SQL Developer to Oracle Cloud Autonomous Database (Always Free Tier)
In a recent article I described how to provision an instance of Oracle Cloud Autonomous Data Warehouse in the recently launched Always Free Tier of OCI. This article shows how to connect from SQL Developer (desktop tool) to this instance. Note: connecting from SQL Developer is the same [of course] […]
Oracle Cloud Always Free Autonomous Data Warehouse – steps to get going
Last month, Oracle announced it’s Cloud Free Tier on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This free tier offers several services (compute, storage, network, monitoring & notifications, serverless functions and Autonomous Database. Two autonomous database instance can be provisioned and leveraged in this “forever free tier” – each with up to 20 […]
Highlights from Oracle OpenWorld 2019 – Larry Ellison’s Key-Notes
This article gives some brief and key insights in Larry Ellison’s keynote presentation on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure at Oracle OpenWorld 2019. Note the new mission statement for Oracle: Our mission is to help people see data in new ways, discover insights, unlock endless possibilities. Autonomous was the key word of […]
Differences between CloudFormation, Terraform and Ansible in deployment of objects in AWS
In this article, I will deploy a simple solution in AWS in three ways: via the AWS templates of CloudFormation, via a Terraform script and via an Ansible script. By doing so, I will show the differences between the mentioned scripts. In the article, I will highlight a few examples […]
InfluxDB V2.0 – Stack Implementation Proof of Concept
This blogpost will give you detailed instructions and information regarding the InfluxDB stack. Since February 2019 InfluxDB now consists not only the database itself, but also Telegraf, Chronograf and Kapacitor. Later you’ll read about what every part of the stack does. 18-2-2019: Living on the bloody edge, do not run […]
How to use any Oracle JET Component in VBCS
Oracle JET has more components than available in VBCS. Using Web Components you can extend VBCS yourself with the missing JET components. In Oracle JET you can add a Paging control to a table. For that you have to use a PagingDataSource. The Paging Control and PagingDataSource are (out of […]