The Oracle Storage Cloud Service is an IaaS offering that underpins [almost] every other PaaS Cloud Service from Oracle. I have been using this service – largely indirectly – with DBaaS, JCS, Application Container Cloud (ACCS) and SOA CS. The initial interaction is usally using Curl against the REST APIs of the Storage Cloud Service. For one off tasks, that works fine. However, while going through development cycles with a Node.js application running on ACCS, it became quite impractical to get hold of my application log files.
My first course of action was to create a local Node.js application that makes HTTP calls to the REST APIs of Storage Cloud. And at some point, that was going so well, I started day dreaming about a command line or even GUI on top of that. Then I was sensible enough to first check whether something like that already exists. And [of course] it does. The Oracle Cloud App Marketplace lists the free CloudBerry Explorer [for OpenStack] that can be used with Oracle Storage Cloud Service.
From that point on, it is a very simple exercise to get it up and running – my graphical UI on top of the Oracle Storage Cloud Service. Click on Get App. In the web page you navigate to, click on Download Freeware for the CloudBerry Explorer:
After downloading, start the installer:
and once the installer is done (next-finish), start the CloudBerry Explorer:
When it starts, you get a popup window where you can select a cloud account to connect the explorer to.
Click on Oracle Cloud and click Close, or simply push ahead and click on File | New Oracle Cloud Account:
The dialog that opens has you enter the details for your storage cloud account, like this:
Note the username that consists of the service instance name, the identity domain and the cloud user name:
Once the connection is successfully tested, we can start browsing, exploring, opening, copying and manipulating:
Removing files can easily be done – much required with all the log-files I am producing:
Opening a file is also quite straightforward – as is copying a file to a local directory.
and:
To me, Cloudberry Explorer was a very useful find – sparing me from a lot of repetitive, time consuming, manual work.
Resources
CloudBerry Download page: http://www.cloudberrylab.com/free-openstack-storage-explorer.aspx
Blog article – how to use CloudBerry with Oracle Storage Cloud – http://www.cloudberrylab.com/blog/how-to-connect-to-oracle-cloud-with-cloudberry/
REST APIs for Oracle Storage Cloud: http://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/storagecs_common/SSAPI/index.html
REST APIs Application Container Cloud – https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/apaas_gs/APCSR/index.html
