February 2021 – RedThunder.Blog

Theia-IDE on Always Free Tier

After building out the OCI Arcade on Oracle Always Free Tier (check out a recent blog here), I was on a roll. What was next? The inspiration came after a virtual session with some other mentors that I was working with. The need to share code, have an environment that was easy to use as well as provide a method of multiples users developing in the same workspace.

I remembered back in 2016, that I used Cloud9 which was a development environment that I could plug into with a full Java environment. We used to for our Developer Experience workshop for some client-side dev (with the client-side installation issues). Cloud9 which since got bought by AWS. And then a few years ago, Eclipse Che and Codenvy surfaced as a potential alternative. It’s still around and going strong from what I see. And I dug a little deeper into Che and found that Che’s browser-based development environment is based upon a project called Theia – a Cloud and Desktop IDE. … So bingo … here it is Theia-IDE deployed into Oracle Always Free Tier for cloud-based / browser development environment. Check out more about what we did.

(Update – 3 December 2021 – There’s been some changes to the docker hub images that were originally used. They are no longer available and hence this is currently broken if you try it. I’ve been investigating the use of the Theia-Blueprint repository to build the cloud environment which seems to be going ok. More to come).

Serverless on Always Free Tier with fnproject

I’ve started posting articles related to the project that @stantanev and a few of us are working on. This is snapshot of the puzzle that is to build out a APIs on the Oracle Always Free Tier.

As a demonstration of capability, we built a few different APIs using fnproject (https://fnproject.io/) – an open-source container-native serverless platform. As part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, there’s Oracle Functions which is the managed Function-as-a-Service based upon this same project.

Let’s take a look at it here and see what it took to get going. Also, this is being deployed into VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro compute shapes (which is 1 OCPU and 1GB of memory) and hence there are some considerations to make sure we get the most out of the kit we have access to (for free).

Turning a Compartment into a ORM Stack

Effective first, then efficient and then elegant …
Peter Laurie – mate and mentor.

I’ve been doing some collaboration with @stantanev around a project and part of the contribution that I was doing was getting some stuff setup / configured and deployed into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This wasn’t a standard copy-and-paste scenario. I was building it up as we went. And then I was done … But it felt unfinished because I didn’t want to just leave it there. I wanted to share what I have without me getting sucked into other work standing up new environments (noting in the last article – I am lazy). And in the first instance, I only had dev (where I was working) and I needed to create a new one so people can start experiencing what we delivered (quickly).

What I invested in was using Oracle Resource Manager “ORM” to help me take what I built in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and turn that into something that I could hand-over. Let’s have a look.

Automating with OCI Oracle Resource Manager

I use this because I’m lazy.

This is true. After doing something that is repetitive because either I’m testing or incrementally improving what is happen, I get frustrated. So, I automate. In this scenario, here I have an application that I’ve been working with a few people (like @stantanev), and as such spending a little bit of time automating the provisioning of the stack made sense. I value my time as I value other people’s time.

Oracle Resource Manager (ORM) is part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and is available in all tiers – Trials, Always Free Tier, Pay-As-You-Go or with Universal Credits. In short – EVERYONE gets it. The easiest way that I think of ORM, is that its a managed Terraform service within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment. Let’s talk a look at it.