Month: May 2019

Enhance the security of your website with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Web Application Firewall

Oracle recently introduced a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to further enhance and secure Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offerings. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure WAF is based on Oracle Zenedge and Oracle Dyn technologies. It inspects all traffic destined to your web application origin and identifies and blocks all malicious traffic. The WAF offers the following tools, which can be used on any website, regardless of where it is being hosted:

  • Origin management
  • Bot management
  • Access control
  • Over 250 robust protection rules that include the OWASP rulesets to protect against SQL injection, cross-site scripting, HTML injection, and more

In this post, I configure a set of access control WAF policies to a website. Access control defines explicit actions for requests that meet conditions based on URI, request headers, client IP address, or countries and regions.

Continue reading “Enhance the security of your website with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Web Application Firewall”

Autoscaling in Oracle Cloud and OKE (Oracle Container Engine) as load generator

I just came across this great article by Ali Mukadam to autoscale OCI instances based on Instance Configuration, Instance Pools and defining auto-scale policies. Finally, using Kubernetes (OKE) to generate load.

Don’t miss out this great read:

https://medium.com/oracledevs/autoscaling-in-oracle-cloud-and-oke-oracle-container-engine-as-load-generator-2e9ccb44b44

Setup Autonomous DB Monitoring in OMC

In this post I will show you how you can setup Autonomous DB monitoring in Oracle Management Cloud (OMC) in under 5 minutes.

NOTE: Make sure you have the appropriate policies setup before you start.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/management-cloud/mcdbm/access-policies-assign-autonomous-database-related-privileges.html

STEP 1
You will need to obtain your OCI User Information associated with your Autonomous Database (ADB) instances from the OCI Console.

  1. Click on the user icon in top right hand corner of OCI console.
  2. Select User Settings
  3. On the User Details page, make a copy of the User OCID
  4. In addition to this, make a copy of the API Key Fingerprint.

STEP 2
You will need to obtain your OCI Tenant Information associated with your Autonomous Database instances from the OCI Console.

  1. Navigate to Administration > Tenancy Details
  2. On the Tenancy Information page, make a Copy of the Tenancy OCID.

HINT: If OCID is hidden, you can click on Show to display entire value if you wish.

STEP 3
In another browser session, launch the OMC Console.

HINT: If the side menu does not appear, click on menu icon

STEP 4
From the side menu, navigate to:

  1. Select Administration
  2. Select Discovery
  3. Select Cloud Discovery Profile

STEP 5
On the Cloud Discovery Profiles Page:
Click on + Add Profile

The Add Discovery Profile Page will appear.

  1. Specify a Profile Name (eg. ADWPROFILE1)
  2. Choose Cloud Service Provider Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
  3. Click + Add
  4. Select Region (eg. Frankfurt)
  5. Select Services (eg. Autonomous Data Warehouse)
  6. Enter Credential Name (eg. ADWCRED)
  7. Enter User OCID (eg. ocid1.user.oc1.xxxxx)
  8. Enter Tenancy OCID (eg. ocid1.tenancy.oc1.xxxxx)
  9. Enter the associated Private key with user API Key
  10. Enter the Fingerprint (eg. nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn)
  11. Click on Start Discovery

STEP 6
On the Cloud Discovery Profiles Page, wait for discovery to complete. 

  1. Click on the Job Status Count
  2. Verify that the Service was completed successfully

This completes the setup. Now you are ready to start monitoring and managing your Autonomous Database in OMC.  Click here here for more.

Why Would you Monitor an Autonomous Database?

You probably heard that Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) leverages machine learning to automate with traditional infrastructure related database administration tasks such as security, backups and patching.

No matter how well designed your database infrastructure is, performance and issues relating application or external components which make up the application ecosystem can still have an impact on end user response time or availability. Continue reading “Why Would you Monitor an Autonomous Database?”