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 […]
Cloud
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 […]
Creating a Katacoda scenario – A Tailor Made On Line Tutorial Environment – for example for Jupyter Notebook
Learn new technologies using real environments – right in your browser. Katacoda is an online platform that offers hundreds of scenarios and sandbox environments to learn about and play with different kinds of technologies. Katacoda is special in that it not only offers the handson instructions – it also provides […]
First steps with Oracle Analytics Cloud – Gather, Explore, Wrangle, Visualize
Data analytics is what turns data into business value. Oracle has a long history in Data Analytics – from Oracle Discoverer and its predecessors such as Data Browser through OBI EE and Endeca to several cloud services. Oracle Analytics Cloud is the strategic offering to adopt going forward – not […]
Internet Intelligence – Checking on the accessibility of your web application from Anywhere in the world – for free with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
A valuable capability that organizations using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure have available is internet intelligence. This capability allows you to monitor the health and accessibility of your web site’s or web application’s host – from over 30 locations across the world. You enter the IP address of the host and the […]
From locally running Node application to Cloud based Kubernetes Deployment
In this article I will discuss the steps I had to go through in order to take my locally running Node application – with various hard coded and sometimes secret values – and deploy it on a cloud based Kubernetes cluster. I will discuss the containerization of the application, the […]
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure CLI Scripts for preparing for OKE Cluster Provisioning
In order to provision a Kubernetes cluster on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you need to prepare the OCI tenancy and create a compartment with appropriate network configuration and associated resources. All set up can be performed through the console – but this is quite tedious, error prone and outright stupid if […]
Create OKE Kubernetes Cluster on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – including Service Request to increase limit
Anyone with a trial account for Oracle Cloud can use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to get herself a three-node Kubernetes Cluster instance, running on Oracle’s managed Kubernetes Engine Cloud Service called OKE. Unfortunately, the default resource limits on the trial account are such that the creation of the cluster will […]
Get going quickly with Command Line Interface for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Docker container
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is Oracle’s second generation infrastructure as a service offering – that support many components including compute nodes, networks, storage, Kubernetes clusters and Database as a Service. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can be administered through a GUI – a browser based console – as well as through a REST […]
How to deploy InfluxDB in Azure using a VM service with dedicated storage
InfluxDB isn’t natively supported on Azure. This blog post will teach you how to deploy InfluxDB (or any other database) in a VM with a managed disk on the Azure platform. This will enable you to use this fast time-series database for your project. If the standard range of […]
Running Elastic Stack (ES and Kibana) on Oracle Container Cloud
It should be simple and in the end it was relatively simple – but still I was struggling a little bit with getting two key components of the Elastic Stack running on Oracle Container Cloud, working together and exposed to the world. For my future reference, here is the configuration […]
5 main building blocks of the new Visual Builder Cloud Service
In may 2018 Oracle introduced the new version of Visual Builder Cloud Service. This version is not just aimed at the Citizen Developer, in the end an experienced JavaScript can do nice things with it. In this blog I will have a look at 5 of the 6 main building […]
Simple CQRS – Tweets to Apache Kafka to Elastic Search Index using a little Node code
Put simply – CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) is an architecture pattern that recognizes the fact that it may be wise to separate the database that processes data manipulations from the engines that handle queries. When data retrieval requires special formats, scale, availability, TCO, location, search options and response times, […]
Oracle API Platform Cloud Service: using the Developer Portal for discovering APIs via the API Catalog and subscribing applications to APIs
At the Oracle Partner PaaS Summer Camps VII 2017 in Lisbon last year, at the end of august, I attended the API Platform Cloud Service & Integration Cloud Service bootcamp. In a series of article’s I will give a high level overview of what you can do with Oracle API […]