August 2021 – RedThunder.Blog

C# Serverless on OCI

I had a meeting the other day with an Oracle Partner and the discussion was about serverless solutions and Oracle Functions was introduced. And the natural question to ask was, “What is your preferred language?”.

They answered, “Mostly PHP. We also use C#”.

I had to think a little. And navigating to the fnproject.io (the open-source project that Oracle Functions is based upon), it was clear that C# was supported. Here’s a quick tour through that experience.

fnproject.io supported languages – golang, Java, javascript, python, ruby and C#.

A couple of quick points:

I didn’t need to install ASP.Net anywhere.
I’m not bound by Windows as the host operating system.

And if ASP.Net is your language of choice, you can also check out Deploy highly available ASP.Net applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the Oracle Architecture Center (here).

Connect your OCI resources to other Clouds with Libreswan

IPSec VPN view from the OCI Network Visualizer

In today’s world, the norm for videos is that they should be short in length, even if they are instructional videos. They cite the short attention span of the targeted audience…. And I do agree to some extent. However, in tech there are many occasions that require a longer length so they can properly address all the details of the topic at hand. Back in March 2021, I recorded myself for the purpose of demonstrating how to configure to completion an Inter-Cloud VPN connection using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) native IPSec VPN tunnel against a Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) with LibreSwan on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instance. The video is nearly 30 minutes long! Only the truly committed will follow along, which is the intention.

I used official OCI documentation as a basis. Basically I explain every single step on this document while I perform them on both OCI and AWS consoles.

This is the link to this document:

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Network/Concepts/libreswan.htm

Even though in the video I present myself as an Oracle employee, which I proudly am, the video and this post are NOT official Oracle documents. Any opinion is my own and only my own.

I hope that you find this step-by-step video helpful. This is the link to it:

P.S. The reason why I am using a non-RFC1918 CIDR prefix is because I am strictly following the steps in the guide.

Monitoring External Oracle Database in OCI

The OCI Observability & Management (O&M) platform gives you the ability to also manage your Oracle Database targets that reside on-premise or hosted on an external platform to OCI.

In order to deploy this, please ensure you have met the prerequisites:

Install the O&M Management Agent
Enable the Services for Agent Plugin :
1. DB Management
  – lifecycle database management capabilities for monitoring, performance management, tuning, and administration
2. Operations Insights
  – analyze and forecast database performance and resource consumption

There are 2 Types of Deployments are available that can be Registered as External Databases

Option 1: Multitenant Architecture – Register Container Databases (CDB) and Pluggable Databases (PDB)
Option 2: Non-Multitenant Architecture – Register Non-Container Database (NCDB)

In this example we will show you how to register for:

Option 1: External Databases for the Multitenant Architecture.

OCI Arcade Now Has A CRM

As each project comes along, there’s something new to add to the OCI Arcade. It started off with the game and Autonomous Database. And then grew into including Kafka, Docker Swarm, Serverless with the FN Project, Terraform, OAuth, Ansible, In-Memory Data Grid with Coherence-CE and more recently with Arm. This time round we’ve adding in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. Why? Up to now, users has been a simple identifier to denote the scores and the events in the game. Nothing more; nothing less. By adding in a CRM into the mix, we’ve opening up the understanding about our contacts and customers providing a richer experience for those coming to the arcade. And ultimately, from a space where we are build, experiment and try something out – adding user profiles opens up endless possibilities. Check out the rest of this about how it’s changed and some of the things we needed to do to make this happen.

Bastion Access For Minecraft

In the previous post, I did some work in managing Security Lists to protect the Minecraft Server. To read about that, head (here). Another method of connecting to the Minecraft Server is through a Bastion Host. As part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, it is free to create a session through the Bastion Service (service limits do apply). Here’s a brief encounter of getting this up and going.

Security Lists for Minecraft

The Minecraft Server has been up and running for a little while now on my Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Always Free Tier. And it’s something that has become more valuable. The hours of crafting, building and mining is something that needs attention. I’ve experienced the situation when months of work has been wiped or worse hacked. It’s not a good feeling.

I’ve been using the Security Lists in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to define specific ingress rules. What I’ve done now is make that easier.