I have written about Steampipe before. And I have stated how much I like this idea of using SQL to access data on cloud resources (and many other types of resources besides). Data is not only more easily accessible in a SQL select statement than in CLI or API calls, […]
Oracle Cloud
Oracle Analytics Cloud, Oracle Big Data Service, Oracle Big Data SQL Cloud Service, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Data Catalog, API Gateway, Blockchain Platform, Container Engine for Kubernetes, Container Registry, Functions,
Oracle MySQL Database Service, Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service,
Oracle Visual Builder, Autonomous Data Warehouse, Autonomous JSON Database, Autonomous Transaction Processing
Visual Dashboard on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Apache Superset and Steampipe
In addition to the OCI Console, there are many ways to inspect the status of Oracle Cloud resources – including the OCI CLI, Terraform, Grafana OCI Plugin, REST API, OCI App. The open source tool Steampipe (Select * from Cloud) enables SQL queries to inspect many non-SQL data sources and […]
News Flash: OCI DevOps – Deployment runner for Shell Stage
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DevOps is a service I have written about on several occasions. The OCI DevOps service provides an Artifact Repository, Git Code repositories, Build Pipelines and Deployment Pipelines that know how to interact with the runtime environments OKE, Oracle Functions and Compute VM. The news flash is that […]
Five part article series introducing Go on OCI
Go – sometimes Golang because internet searching for just “go” is quite impossible – is a popular programming language. It was initially launched in 2012 and as been gaining popularity ever since. It has embraced many of the good things from other languages including Java and improved on a number […]
OCI Function Parameters based on Vault Secrets–an enhancement request
OCI Functions are powerful components in a cloud native world. Triggered by events and direct requests, these functions are engaged to perform a specific task. Which could be almost anything (as long as it does not take too long). And it can certainly be some task that requires access to […]
Many ways to provision Oracle Cloud Resources using Terraform
Terraform is used for automated provisioning of resource on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Resources are defined in HCL – the DSL used in Terraform for describing infrastructure – and these definitions are processed by the OCI provider for Terraform that turns the definitions into the required calls to the OCI REST […]
Create Terraform Stack and Apply it to Provision Resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Terraform is the tool of choice for automated provisioning of cloud resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (IaC). In two recent articles, I have demonstrated how to create a plan with resource definitions to be processed by the OCI provider for Terraform and how to (re)use a Terraform Module to allow […]
Terraform Modules, For-Each, File Set on Oracle Cloud
The creation of cloud resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is ideally done as Infra as Code using Terraform (plans). No hands need to touch the console, no permissions need to be given to individual users and all actions can be previewed, tested and easily repeated. The support for Terraform in […]
Terraform from Cloud Shell for OCI resource creation through Infra as Code
The creation of cloud resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is ideally done as Infra as Code using Terraform (plans). No hands need to touch the console, no permissions need to be given to individual users and all actions can be previewed, tested and easily repeated. OCI has deep support for […]
Delayed Delivery in OCI Queue Service–time based message release
Messages published to an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Queue may not immediately be intended for consumption. It is a not uncommon requirement to make messages available for consumption only at a specific moment in time, rather than right away. OCI Queue does not currently have built in support for a […]
Generic OCI Resource manipulation with OCI CLI Raw Request
I should have been aware of it – but I was not. The generic OCI CLI Raw Request option – the uniform approach to any OCI resource query or manipulation through OCI CLI. With raw request, each call looks like this: oci raw-request –http-method POST –target-uri API-ENDPOINT/API-PATH/resourcetype/resource-OCID –request-body file://request.json The […]
First Steps with OCI Queue Service–fully managed massively scalable FIFO queue
In an earlier article, I have explored the promise of OCI Queue – a managed queue service launched in December 2022. In this article I will show my first real activities with OCI Queue. Small steps, granted. But surely helpful to give you some idea of what this service is […]
OCI Queue– simple, powerful, heavy duty reliable decoupling
The new OCI Queue Service provides a straightforward offering: publish messages into a persisted store and allow consumers to retrieve these messages from that store – the oldest message first (FIFO). Interaction with OCI Queue can be done through REST API calls or through the STOMP-protocol (the Simple (or Streaming) […]
Quickest way to run a container on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: container instances
Container Instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are VM based environments that can be leveraged as “serverless” container runtimes. Once a container instance has been defined – which is a very simple, rapid procedure – we can specify the container images (OCI – open container initiative – compliant) for which containers […]
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure–flutter of activity: Queue, Container Instances
Over the last few days, in this pre-Holiday season period, Oracle has released a number of interesting new services and updates to existing services. I plan on exploring them in more detail in the coming weeks. (note: the illustration is courtesy of StableDiffusion – using the prompt “a painting of […]
Gitpod for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure development
Gidpod provides ephemeral development environments. Run a Gitpod workspace and get a clean environment with precisely those components that have been configured for the use case or context you need to work in. Everytime a workspace is initialized and everyone who does that, the environment will be exactly the same. […]
Run "docker-compose" on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute using Podman
Running “docker compose” in a VM on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is perhaps not the ideal way to go – which probably would be OKE (Kubernetes) in order to benefit most from modern container infrastructure features and leverage the underlying VMs the most. However, sometimes falling back on what works and […]
Quick Start Compute Instance on OCI (for software development)
I have worked quite a bit in Oracle Cloud, starting back in 2015. I have used many different OCI services – such as Integration, Streaming, Functions, OKE, API Gateway, Object Storage, DBaaS and several more. However, for some reason I have almost complete avoided the almost simplest service of all: […]
Oracle Cloud Go SDK and Instance Principal based Authentication
In a recent article, I described the use of the OCI SDK for Go(Lang) – in my example to interact with the ObjectStorage service. In the article, I used authentication based on tenancy and user ocid, fingerprint and private key. However, when the Go application is running in an OCI […]
Interacting with OCI Object Storage using Go SDK (first steps)
I am still fairly new at working with Go. I have the ambition of working with and perhaps even on several open source projects that all use Go as their implementation language. It seems like the number of open source projects that use Go is increasing [rapidly]. It seems that […]
Getting started quickly with querying OCI from Terraform in Cloud Shell
Terraform is all about infrastructure (and platform) as code. Creating OCI resources through Terraform is probably the best way to manage your cloud resources. I have written several articles about that. In this article I will quickly show the steps you can take for querying OCI resources using Terraform – […]
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 Build Pipeline for Functions
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers the Functions service, a FaaS offering with serverless functions, based on container images built with the Project Fn FDK. In a previous article, I introduced the OCI DevOps Deployment Pipeline for Functions – a free service on OCI that automated the deployment of a Function from […]
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, […]
Simple queries against Oracle Cloud NoSQL Database
I have been struggling in my first simple steps with querying data in a NoSQL Database table on Oracle Cloud. Creating the table is easy enough – either in the console or through Terraform or the CLI. However, the data that my Node application creates in the table seemed very […]
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 […]
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 […]
Create OCI Function running a Playwright scenario
TL;DR – How to create a Function on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that uses the Playwright library for running headless browser scenarios, for example for Web UI Health Check and Performance Monitoring, for tactical integration and simple RPA and for web based reporting. The article shows a custom Docker container image […]
First code and cli free steps with Oracle Database 21c in Oracle Cloud
Oracle Database 21c has been released – for now only in the cloud. Starting to explore – that is what we call playing with it – it easy and free of any charge in the OCI Always Free Tier that includes two Oracle Database instances that now can be 21c […]
OpenAPI Support in Oracle API Gateway
Today I read the announcement of OpenAPI (fka Swagger) support in API Gateway on OCI. I was wondering what that entailed and I decided to try it out. In short, this support means that an API definition can be uploaded to API Gateway, is validated for correctness and can be […]
Run SonarQube on OCI– 10 minutes to get going using Docker Container on always free VM
In this article I want to describe how I run a SonarQube instance (that I intend to use from my automated CI/CD pipeline) on OCI, using a simple VM and a simple Docker container image. The VM gets a public IP address and I need to SSH into it in […]
Oracle Functions–Mental Picture vs. Physical Reality
Oracle Functions are the Functions as a Service (or FaaS) offering on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Functions are the serverless, stateless execution engines that play such an important role in cloud native applications. Functions handle requests and events, contributing to live application behavior, streaming activities and integrations. Functions are also used […]
Demystifying Blockchain for Enterprise – Realizing its potential?
The goal of this series of blogs – Demystifying Blockchain for Enterprise – is to take away the cloudiness and complexity around blockchain. In this second part I will explain where in my opinion the potential of the technology is within certain industries and explore what kind of problems blockchain in the enterprise space can solve.
Demystifying Blockchain for Enterprise – What’s the buzz?
The goal of this series of blogs – Demystifying Blockchain for Enterprise – is to take away the cloudiness and complexity around blockchain. In this first part I will explain the technology behind enterprise blockchain, using of smart contracts as decentralized application, and how it compares to a traditional database.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Vault Service to generate, manage and encrypt & decrypt using Keys
The Vault service lets you create vaults in your tenancy as containers for encryption keys and secrets. Vaults are logical entities where the Vault service creates and durably stores keys and secrets. The type of vault you have determines features and functionality such as degrees of storage isolation, access to […]
Example of OCI Function as Resource Principal [enabled] to invoke OCI services
Resource Principal is an OCI resource that through its membership of a Dynamic Group and permissions granted through policies to the Dynamic Group is given access to OCI resources and services. Examples of Resource Principals are Function and API Gateway. A Function that is resource principal enabled can for example […]
Reading Query Parameters in GET requests to Project Fn Functions (and Oracle Functions as a Service)
TLDR: query parameters can be retrieved from the Fn-Http-Request-Url header in the ctx parameter passed by Fn to the Node function handling the request; using url.parse() on that header retrieves the url query parameters Project Fn is an open source container native serverless framework. Project Fn provides a runtime […]
A Quick how-to RMAN backup to OCI Object Storage
This is a quick how-to article on setting up RMAN to backup to Object Storage on OCI. This is applicable when you build your on Oracle database on an OCI instance, or when you have a database on-premise you wish to backup to the (OCI) cloud.
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 […]