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 […]
DevOps
Cleaning Out a Compartment on Oracle Cloud using Terraform provider
The situation: a Compartment on OCI should be removed. Or at least all its resources should be purged. Or at least most of the resources should be removed. The challenge: there is no “purge compartment” available that will delete the resources in the compartment. Removing each resource one by one […]
Scaling [down] the Mountain of Debt – Four dimensions of IT Debt
![Scaling [down] the Mountain of Debt – Four dimensions of IT Debt](https://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image.png)
WYSIWYG may not be true for all IT systems. What you see may be more than what you actually get. As a Product Owner, you have to be very careful to not deceive yourself. The latest iteration of your product may be shiny and new – but all may not […]
Architecture in an agile world
This year I had to work with a colleague for multiple internal poc’s that we could use to show customers. Together we started thinking about the approach and where to start. We planned to approach it in a Scrum way, but soon landed upon the question where architecture would fit […]
Stop DELETE_IN_PROGRESS when custom resources fail in AWS CloudFormation
Script to stop the execution of CloudFormation when you made a small error in a custom resource (Lambda function).
Jenkins: Obtaining and displaying credentials
Jenkins is a solid CI/CD platform which has proven itself over the years. Many organizations use it to build, test and deploy their applications. In Jenkins it is possible to define credentials or to use an external credential store. You can then use these inside your pipelines and jobs. Direct […]
SonarCloud: OWASP Dependency-Check reports
SonarCloud is a hosted SonarQube SaaS solution which helps you with code quality management. It is free to use for open source projects. You cannot install 3rd party plugins in SonarCloud however. This puts some limitations on the kind of data you can put in SonarCloud. For Java this is […]
OWASP ZAP: A quick introduction to a versatile open source DAST tool
OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is an open source dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool. It is available here and has a website with documentation here. I recently encountered it when looking for open source security test tools to embed in a CI/CD pipeline (here). I was surprised by how versatile this tool […]
How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (1)
What’s in a name? A title is important and I hope that it describes well what I do want to share with you in this series of articles. It is not so much about how to use the back-end part (Oracle Database) or the front-end (Oracle APEX, Java, Node, React […]
How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (6)
Last time in “How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (5)”, I told you about Git, Subversion, Maven and Flyway. In this final article, I will discuss the following tools & methods: Oracle SQL Developer, utPLSQL, SonarQube, Perl, Ant and DevOps. Oracle […]
How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (5)
Last time in “How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (4)”, I told you about the Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. This time I will discuss the following tools: Git, Subversion, Maven and Flyway. Flyway The first tool I would like to […]
How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (4)
Last time in “How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (3)”, I told you about the Oracle Database and Oracle APEX. This time I will discuss Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler A book I can recommend is Oracle […]
How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (3)
Last time in “How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (2)”, I did show you the database structure. This time I will elaborate on the base tools, the Oracle Database and Oracle APEX. Oracle Database How to use it? I can tell […]
How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (2)
Last time in “How to build an Oracle Database application (that supports APEX, Java, React or any other front-end) (1)”, I gave you an introduction. This time I will elaborate on the database structure. Project folder layout The following top level directories may exist for every database application project: Directory Description […]
Deploy A Docker Container To AWS With Azure Pipelines
Introduction In response to a demo I gave about deploying a docker container to the Azure platform, I received some questions about deploying a docker container to the AWS platform. I wrote a guide on how to deploy a docker container with Azure Pipelines here. In my opinion is Azure […]
Connect Azure Pipelines with sonarcloud through maven (YAML)
Introduction Sonarcloud is a static code analysis tool. This means that it checks out the code at your repository, does an analysis and shows you the results. It may look something like this: It gives detailed information about your code and you can for example let it scan if you […]
Azure Pipelines: publish to Azure Artifacts
This article is a follow-up to my previous article about using Azure Artifacts for own NPM modules. In that article I showed how to create a NPM module by hand on your local system and publish it to Azure Artifacts. But now we like to integrate it into CI/CD, so […]
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 […]
Deploy Angular and Node.js webapp in Azure Pipelines (part 5)
In the previous article I explained how to set up multiple environments for Azure Pipelines. In this article I will explain how you can deploy the artifacts to the on-premise VM’s. This are the artifacts you build in the pipeline. I am using an template for this, because we are […]
On-premise VM’s and Azure Pipelines: Set up with multiple stages in Azure Pipelines (part 4)
In the previous article we discussed how we can build a pipeline and at some tests to it. In this article we’re going to discuss how we can set up the on-premise VM’s so that we can deploy the artifacts to them. You can also deploy the artifacts to an […]
Add tests for Angular and Node.js webapp in Azure Pipelines (part 3)
In the previous article I showed how to build a webapp in the Azure pipeline. In this article I will explain to you how you run tests in your pipeline. I will show you how to do this for both Angular and Node.js. Adding tests frontend – Angular Adding tests […]
Azure Pipeline: Build Angular and Node.js webapp (part 2)
In the previous article, we discussed how we can set up a pipeline with multiple stages in Azure Pipelines. In this article we will discuss how we can build the Angular and Node.js apps in the pipeline itself. I usually put all the build processes in one stage. In that […]
Azure Pipelines: Using and set up a webapp (part 1)
This will be the first part 5 part series about Azure Pipelines. In this first part I will explain to you how to set up your Azure Pipeline so it’s capable of deploying a Node.js and Angular webapp. We will use Node for the backend and Angular for the frontend. […]
Azure Pipelines: How to build and test an Angular and Node.js webapp and deploy it to on-premise VM’s using multiple stages (YAML) – Overview
What is Azure Pipelines? Azure pipelines is a free continuous integration/continuous delivery tool from Azure Devops (Microsoft). Not only can it deploy to the azure cloud, it can also deploy to self hosted VMs. Even multiple, with multiple stages. For instance, an Acceptance, Test and Production environment. All of this […]
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 […]
Setup and use of oVirt on CentOS7
Today, I’ll explain how to install and use oVirt: a nice virtualization tool for Linux, which is based on KVM. I installed the current production version 4.3.8 on a test machine, a Medion machine with an extra SSD drive. As usual, you’ll find the installation file for pxe that I […]
Using PXE to deploy a DNS server
Last week, I published a blog about implementing a PXE server [1]. Today I’ll show how kickstart/anaconda files can be used to deploy a server. I will use the example of a DNS-server to explain what can be changed where in kickstart files and what you can do when the […]
Deploying CentOS 8 using PXE
What is PXE? PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) is a method of deploying an operating system to a computer over the network. I think it’s great: you don’t need to burn CD’s or DVD’s anymore. The only thing you have to do is changing the boot order in the BIOS, and […]
Custom Log Parser in OMC Log Analytics to deal with Extended Logging in WebLogic Access Log
We recently enabled Extended HTTP Access Logging on our WebLogic Managed Servers. This adds the average response times and potentially several other valuable values to the WebLogic Access Log files. Unfortunately, the WebLogic Access Log file parser in Oracle Management Cloud Log Analytics does not know how to handle the […]
Smoke Escaping from a Black Box – how to tackle major production issues on a system that is not very transparent
This story is based on true events. It happened fairly recently. I was called into an organization that was experiencing performance and stability issues that affected mission critical processes. Every now and again, and increasingly frequently, their service bus stopped working. It appeared as if only a restart could get […]
Getting Started on Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana
Monitoring sounds like a terribly useful thing to do. And in many situations it is of course. However, rather than starting our discussion with monitoring, we really should start from the reasons for considering monitoring. With regard to IT, we typically are faced with non-functional requirements regarding business applications. The […]
Jenkins 2.0 pipeline: Scripting active parameters for SCM
Last year I got introduced to the new features 2nd generation Jenkins at a workshop of CloudBees . This year I got also the opportunity to discover them in practice. One of the most interesting and often challenging part of working with scripted pipelines is the gap between the list of plugins supported […]
Getting started with Enterprise Modules’ ora_profile to install Oracle 18c
A couple of moths ago, Enterprise Modules announced the easy to start way of making use their Oracle modules, ora_profile. Recently their modules have been updated to support the on-premise release of Oracle 18c (18.3). In this post I’ll explain how to get started using Vagrant, VirtualBox and a little […]
First Steps with Prometheus and Grafana on Kubernetes on Windows
Preparation: before I started with Prometheus, I installed VirtualBox, Minikube with Tiller on my Windows 10 laptop – as described in this article: https://technology.amis.nl/2018/08/13/running-kubernetes-1-10-using-minikube-on-windows-10-adding-kubectl-and-helm-tiller/. I then increased the Base Memory setting for the minikube vm to 8192 MB (the default 2048 MB is not sufficient) After making this change – […]
A DBA’s first steps in Jenkins
My Customer wanted an automated way to refresh an application database to a known state, to be done by non-technical personnel. As a DBA I know a lot of scripting, can build some small web interfaces, but why bother when there are ready available tools, like Jenkins. Jenkins is mostly […]
Getting started with git behind a company proxy
Since a few months I’ve been involved in working with git to save our Infrastructure as Code in GitHub. But I don’t want to have to type in my password every time and do not like in clear text saved passwords, so I prefer ssh over https. But when working […]
Oracle Managed Kubernetes Cloud– First Steps with Automated Deployment using Wercker Pipelines
Oracle announced a managed Kubernetes Cloud service during Oracle OpenWorld 2017. This week, I had an opportunity to work with this new container native cloud offering. It is quite straightforward: Through the Wercker console a new Cluster can be created on a Oracle BareMetal Cloud (aka Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) environment. […]
Oracle Compute Cloud – Uploading My Image – Part Two – Linux 7
In this sequel of part one I will show how you can upload your own (Oracle) Linux 7 image in the IAAS Cloud of Oracle. This post will use the lessons learnt by using AWS which I described here. The tools used are: VirtualBox, Oracle Linux 7, Oracle IAAS Documentation […]
Dump Oracle data into a delimited ascii file with PL/SQL
This is how I dump data from an Oracle Database (tested on 8i,9i,10g,11g,12c) to a delimited ascii file: Next to the query and the generated filename the Dump_Delimited function takes another 6 parameters, each one with a default value. Check out the PL/SQL, and BTW… the basics for this code […]