RedThunder.Blog

VBCS Fixed Credentials Configuration for backend API Service Connection!!!

Recently, I have been come across scenario where one of my Customer, building a VBCS application which needs a combobox to be populated with all IDCS Users name as approver. Customer builds the solution but was having issue with existing solution. Problem was when One user e.g. Sys Admin User ID (Administrator role) login using his credentials, he can see combobox populated with IDCS users name. However, when another business user when they login they can’t see combobox fetching IDCS User list. Obliviously, its permission issue. Sys Admin being part of IDCS Admin group has all privilege but other users in his tenancy are not, hence problem was coming.

Now, VBCS has two mechanisms for Identity propagation. Please read this section for more info. a) login user identity gets propagated to invoke REST API as part of service connection b) Developer can use fixed credentials to invoke backend REST API using service connection.

Secure your OIC Integration using OAuth Security Policy

Security is the key aspect in any implementation, specially when it comes to publish your API/Integration to external consumer outside of your organization.

Oracle Integration Cloud has capability to design an Integration which could be shared across internal/external Organisation. In this scenario security is paramount to protect that endpoint which will be published through OIC. By default, if your OIC Integration has REST Endpoint with Trigger role, it’s offering Basic Authentication Or OAuth 2.0 Or both Security policy.

With Invoke role there are many other flavours of OAuth grant type which I won’t be covering in this blog. I am more focused on this blog for OAuth 2.0 for OIC Rest Adapter for trigger role only.

OCI IAM Domains User Access Review

One of the recent additions to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is IAM Domains. New OCI tenancies are provisioned with IAM Domains and at time of writing tenancies with IDCS instances are being migrated to IAM Domains.

I originally created Peek to create a visual representation of effective user permissions inside an OCI tenancy to assist with performing user access reviews. Excessive permissions and IAM misconfigurations are a common issue found in cloud environments that can lead to privilege escalation and/or unauthorised access to resources and data.

At time of writing the latest release of the OCI CLI now supports interacting with IAM Domain resources and so I have created a version of Peek that works with IAM domains.

5 Steps to OIC Observability with Logging Analytics

With the recent announcement from Gartner Magic Quadrant Report, it’s no surprise that Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) is the Leader in Data Integration.

As a result, we have seen an explosion of demand for the service over the past 12 months. What we have seen is that many customers have been reaching out to my colleague @lsiliver and myself across APAC (Asia Pacific) and we are seeing that OIC customers want observability and deeper insights into their integration processes, data pipelines, workflows, automation and services.

So, in this blog post, we will walk you through this scenario on how you can get started on achieving this.

Many customers may not be aware but we already have existing native integration capabilities for OIC with our Observability & Management platform.

Access Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) resides in Private Subnet via Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) connectivity agent

Recently came across interesting use case, so thought to cover blog on that topic. One of my Customer was having issue to connect OIC to Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) which is sitting in private subnet via Oracle Integration Cloud connectivity agent. So, I did some debugging and fix the issue and that learning I am going to cover here. I will explain here how we can setup an ATP Database in private subnet, setup all required security/firewall rules, setup OIC connectivity agent, bastion compute in public subnet and then connecting OIC to ATP DB sitting in private subnet via Connectivity agent.

In this fictitious scenario, customer HR division representative sending employee code to OIC REST endpoint to retrieve detailed information for an employee record which is been stored in Oracle ADB instance located in private subnet. Since, ADB is in private subnet it’s not accessible to outside world even app tier, and that’s where OIC Connectivity agent comes into picture to provide connectivity between OIC which is public internet and ADB database which is in private subnet.

Process Automation helps you to rapidly design, automate, and manage business processes in the Cloud

Step-by-step guide discovering how to provision and build a business process with OCI Process Automation

OCI Process Automation (shortly OPA) is an OCI PaaS Oracle Managed cloud service which helps customers to build their business processes based on Structured or Unstructured models. This is the best solution to easily manage business processes granting to business users to build their own implementations without coding but just using a web browser and drag&drop capabilities… what we usually call a “no code” environment

The article has the goal to explain how, step by step, we can quickly test the features included in OPA… starting from my experience with the tool.

Just to simplify the explanation, I will describe a “happy path” process … in my example building one business process which usually is quite loved by everyone…. mainly when talking about the Vacation Request Approvals 🙂

Automating Security List Rule reviews in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

If you’re running workloads in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) then it’s likely you’ll be familiar with Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) resources such as Subnets, Route Tables, Gateways etc. These software defined components allow you to build networks in OCI for you to deploy and run your workloads.

Oracle has documentation that explains VCN access and security features which include things like Security Rules, Security Zones, Local and Network Firewalls, and IAM policies. Security rules are made up of Security Lists and Network Security Groups (NSG’s) and are a foundational element of every VCN and Subnet that you create. They define what traffic is allowed in and out of your subnets and what hosts can talk to one another. When you create a subnet a Security List is automatically created with some default rules:

When it comes to implementing network access controls, you can use Security Lists, Network Security Groups or both. They are virtual firewall features that control traffic at the packet level. I’ll be covering Network Security Group reviews in a later post as I want to focus on Security Lists, specifically how you can easily review and validate rules to ensure they align with your workload, organisational, security and compliance requirements.

Managing multiple Let’s Encrypt certificates with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

In my previous post I explained how you can use Let’s Encrypt and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) serverless functions to obtain a publicly signed SSL certificate, and automatically manage its renewal lifecycle. The solution works as expected; I have a Let’s Encrypt certificate for my website automatically renewing 30 days before expiry. If you haven’t read my previous post I’d recommend taking a look before following the setup outlined below as it covers how the solution works, and some prerequisites.

Having multiple workloads running in various OCI regions I started thinking about a more elegant way to provision certificates across multiple regions. Certificates stored in the certificate service are only available to resources in the same region and would have required a function to be deployed in each region, and for each SSL certificate required.

I’ve since updated the solution to address this requirement. It is now possible to provision certificates across multiple OCI regions using a single OCI Function application. I’ve also taken the opportunity to implement other features such as:

Loading a list of certificates you want to manage from a JSON file stored in Object Storage.
Adding support for wildcard SSL certificates.
Adding support for Subject Alternative Names (SAN) in addition to the CN name.
Adding support for the use of DNS zones and Vaults that reside in different regions to the OCI Function.

Adding support to specify which vault, and region to use for a given certificate ensures that workloads with strict cryptographic key material requirements can still benefit from this solution.

If you’ve already followed the instructions from my previous post, the solution will continue to work as described. The only limitation being that it’ll only work for a single certificate. By following the steps below you can easily upgrade to issuing multiple certificates. If you haven’t set anything up yet that’s also fine as I’ll be covering the full install again here.

Let’s Encrypt serverless automation with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Let’s Encrypt made its debut back in late 2015. It is a free Certificate Authority provided by the Internet Security Research Group. The goal was to support the adoption of SSL / TLS to ensure the privacy of information sent over the public Internet. Let’s Encrypt is now serving over 2.5M certificates per day.

If you’re reading this it’s likely you’ve had to deal with SSL certificates before. It’s also likely some of you will have investigated an outage, only to find that an SSL certificate expired somewhere that no one knew about. Certificate discovery, management, and renewal can be time consuming and not much fun.

Cloud providers have made this job easier with the introduction of certificate services that are able to issue public Domain Validation (DV) certificates. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) currently allows you to create private Certificate Authorities (CA’s), private Certificates, and private Certificate Authority bundles. Private certificate resources are used to secure communication across a private network, where certificates can be installed and trusted to enable secure communication.

But what about publicly signed certs for users connecting over the Internet? Using a private OCI certificate will result in a “certificate not trusted” error in your web browser; this is where Let’s Encrypt comes in. I’m going to show you how to run a completely automated serverless Let’s Encrypt solution in your OCI tenancy to install and automatically renew certificates that show as trusted in your web browser.

Fusion ERP Custom Business Object Event Ingestion via OIC Fusion ERP Adapter !!!

Oracle Fusion Applications are a suite of applications built on Oracle Cloud that include cloud-based applications for enterprise resource planning, enterprise performance management, supply chain management and manufacturing, human capital management, and customer experience.

There are numerous use cases where standard object resides inside Fusion ERP needs to be extended to include more fields or completely new Custom object needs to be created.

In this blog, I will be covering how you can create a new Custom Object inside Fusion ERP and trigger transactions for that Custom object.