November 2018 – RedThunder.Blog

Teaching How to Generate Wildcard SSL Certificates for your LBaaS

Security is super important, but also annoying. From a backend developer mindset, all I want is to build great services exposed as APIs that the world can consume with ease. The problem is that in most cases, consumption of my endpoints will be blocked by browsers and other tools/client unless they are exposed as HTTPS with valid SSL certificates.

In this blog, I am going to show you how to use Let’s Encrypt to create your own “Wildcard SSL Certificate” for your existing domain, for example: *.mydomain.com – Then I am going to show you how to assign this certificate to your Oracle LBaaS Listener endpoint.

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Oracle MFT – OIC Integration

Even in a day and age where event-based and real-time data exchange is prevalent and growing, the truth is there are still massive amounts of data exchanged using file transfer mechanisms. Oracle has always played in this realm, but with limited success. The Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) application is pretty good, but nothing to write home about… or write a blog about! 😀

One reason is because moving files around and using FTP servers is not very glamorous. Another reason is because the Oracle MFT management dashboard is pretty limited. It is able to monitor various aspects of a file transfer, report success or failure and allow you to resend files. But it has no business context or the ability to understand how a file might be part of a larger business process.

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Teaching How to Get Started with Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE)

In a previous blog, I explained how to provision a Kubernetes cluster locally on your laptop (either as a single node with minikube or a multi-node using VirtualBox), as well as remotely in the Oracle Public Cloud IaaS. In this blog, I am going to show you how to get started with Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). OKE is a fully-managed, scalable, and highly available service that you can use to deploy your containerized applications to the cloud on Kubernetes.

Teaching How to Invoke REST APIs from Oracle Visual Builder Web/Mobile Apps

In this blog, I am going to show you how to build a nice and simple UI with data coming from invoking REST APIs. All without code, but in just a few clicks.

I consider myself a good backend developer, good at making things functional, but I really struggle every time I need to produce nice UIs. However, using Oracle Visual Builder, I feel like I don’t have to be a UI developer or designer, I can very easily produce nice and friendly mobile UIs that consume my backend REST APIs. If you are like me, a backend programmer who loves API-first design approach, I’m sure that you will find this blog not only informative, but also refreshing.

This is a quick view of what we are going to achieve in this article:

First, we are going to auto-create Service controls in Oracle Visual Builder by pointing to existing REST APIs.
Then, we are going to use the out-of-the box widgets and components to build a simple, yet powerful UI that consumes such APIs.
Finally, we are going to publish the UI and test it across different media, e.g. Web on a laptop, mobile, tablets, etc.

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Teaching How to Invoke Gen2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) resources via REST APIs

I am thrilled with the Oracle’s Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure architecture, where Oracle completely separates the Cloud Control Computers from the User Code, so that no threats can enter from outside the cloud and no threats can spread from within tenants.

Obviously with more security, there comes more coordination, especially at the moment of invoking OCI resources APIs. Luckily, Oracle did a good job at providing a simple to use CLI and SDK (see here for more information).

For the purpose of this blog, I built a simple NodeJS application that helps demystify the security aspect of invoking OCI APIs. Check this link for examples of running similar code across other Programming Languages.

My NodeJS application manages OCI resources in order to:

List ADW instances
Stop an ADW instance
Start an ADW instance

I started this NodeJS application to list, start and stop ADW resources. However, I designed this application to easily extend it to invoke any other type of OCI resources.

I containerised this application with Docker, to make it easier to ship and run.

This is a picture of the moving parts:

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Applying Oracle Machine Learning in Oracle Autonomous Database on Home Loan Approval Data

*The machine learning process used for this exercise*

Hope you have heard about the Oracle’s Self Driving Autonomous Database. Autonomous Database is an autonomous data management software in the cloud to deliver automated patching, upgrades, and tuning — including performing all routine database maintenance tasks while the system is running — without human intervention. This new autonomous database is self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing, which helps to eliminate manual database management and human errors. Also, there is also a secret weapon called Machine Learning in a Box built into the Oracle Autonomous Database Platform. Here is a quick lab guide to get you started on how to use the Oracle Autonomous Database Platform.

In this article, I would like to walk you through a practical example of how we can take advantage of the Machine Learning capability in the Oracle Autonomous Database Platform and make decisions instantly.

Here is a background of our Fictitious company: Vision Housing Finance Corp that deals in home loans. They have a presence across all urban, semi-urban and rural areas. Customer first applies for a home loan after that company validates the customer eligibility for a loan.

Problem

VisionCorp wants to automate the loan eligibility process (real-time) based on customer detail provided while filling the online application form. These details are Gender, Marital Status, Education, Number of Dependents, Income, Loan Amount, Credit History and others. So they would like to understand if they can take their existing data sets and apply some machine learning to automate the loan decision-making process. You can download the historical dataset that this company has provided from here.

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Teaching How to Increase Value from your Data

Databases and Data Warehouses have been around for a long time and they bring multiple benefits to business, but these also come at a cost. Some of the associated challenges include:

Complex and Expensive to provision and secure
Inability to manage data and user growth
Costly to maintain

In this post, I will provide some resources on how Oracle Autonomous Database and Data Warehouse aim at easing these challenges and increase the speed at which you can innovate and the value you can get from your data.

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