Author: Carlos Rodriguez Iturria

I am extremely passionate about people, technology and the most effective ways to connect the two by sharing my knowledge and experience. Working collaboratively with customers and partners inspires and excites me, especially when the outcome is noticeable valuable to a business and results in true innovation. I enjoy learning and teaching, as I recognise that this is a critical aspect of remaining at the forefront of technology in the modern era. Over the past 10+ years, I have developed and defined solutions that are reliable, secure and scalable, working closely with a diverse range of stakeholders. I enjoy leading engagements and am very active in the technical communities – both internal and external. I have stood out as a noticeable mentor running technology events across major cities in Australia and New Zealand, including various technology areas such as, Enterprise Integrations, API Management, Cloud Integration, IaaS and PaaS adoption, DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Automation among others. In recent years, I have shaped my role and directed my capabilities towards educating and architecting benefits for customers using Oracle and AWS Cloud technologies. I get especially excited when I am able to position both as a way to exceed my customers’ expectations. I hold a bachelor degree in Computer Science and certifications in Oracle and AWS Solutions Architecture.

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.

Continue reading “Teaching How to Invoke REST APIs from Oracle Visual Builder Web/Mobile Apps”

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:

Continue reading “Teaching How to Invoke Gen2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) resources via REST APIs”

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.

Continue reading “Teaching How to Increase Value from your Data”

Teaching a trick to easily import Excel Data into Oracle Autonomous Database (ADW and ATP)

The other day my boss shared with me a nice trick that I found it very useful and has simplified my life a lot, when creating demos or quick prototypes. For this reason and knowing how many people are quickly switching into using Oracle Autonomous Database (ADW or ATP), I thought it would be a good idea to be shared as a quick reference.

The trick consists in using SQL Developer to easily import Data from Excel spreadsheets, directly into Oracle Autonomous DB (ADW or ATP). This also opens up a nice wizard that helps create and configure new database tables to be created and then used to import the data. How cool is that?

This complements a previous article that explains how to provision and get started with Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database. Also, we have published articles to get started with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.

Remember, the difference is simple:

Continue reading “Teaching a trick to easily import Excel Data into Oracle Autonomous Database (ADW and ATP)”

Teaching How to get Microservices to Consume Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database (ATP)

A few days ago, we published an article that shows how to provision and connect to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database (ATP). Based on this, we got multiple requests to also demonstrate how to extend the connection to the Autonomous DB, not only from SQL Developer, but also from polyglot microservices.

In this blog, we are going to take a step forward and create a simple “Hello World” NodeJS application that exposes some REST APIs that push and pull data using an Oracle Autonomous DB. The idea is to give you all knowledge required, to be start building your own microservices, consuming data from Autonomous DB.

Continue reading “Teaching How to get Microservices to Consume Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database (ATP)”

Teaching How to get started with Autonomous Database for OLTP

We all know that data is massively valuable to businesses, whether it is to support daily business transactional activities (Online Transaction Processing – OLTP), or to help business with planning, problem solving and decision making (Online Analytical Processing – OLAP). Either way, businesses heavily rely on both ways to support their most important strategies and activities.

Until recently, companies had to heavily invest in provisioning, securing, patching and driving either way of Online Data processing mechanisms. In most cases, even with Cloud adoption, companies still had to rely on their own skills to make sure that their databases were properly patched, secured, tuned and managed.

However, today there is another option with the recent announcements that Oracle have made around Autonomous Databases for both OLAP and OLTP data processing. What this means, is that Oracle has taken automation to a totally new level with the assistance of Machine Learning. The idea is that the DB itself is self-sufficient with a full set of automated activities that range from patching, securing, optimising, etc. This will reduce not only the effort to run data workloads, but removing completely human errors, creating the opportunity to not only keep the lights on, but to focus on crucial business activities around innovation and differentiation.

Continue reading “Teaching How to get started with Autonomous Database for OLTP”

Circuit Breaker in Service Mesh – Istio/Envoy

This Lab, logically follows previous steps required to provision and curate a Kubernetes cluster. Please review them before proceeding. If you are in doubt, feel free to contact me directly via https://www.linkedin.com/in/citurria/

Testing BookInfo app with Circuit Breaker based policy

The third and last test in the Service Mesh, is using a Circuit Breaker based pattern. It further protects our microservices in case of certain conditions occur, such as preventing that an unexpected number of requests overflow and affect the microservices in the service mesh.

We might decide to throttle or simply reject new incoming requests when a number of current incoming http requests reaches certain threshold.

For demonstration purposes, we are going to set rules to allow a maximum of 1 request at a time. If more than 1 request comes in, we will prevent it from entering the mesh.

Continue reading “Circuit Breaker in Service Mesh – Istio/Envoy”

Policy Enforcement in Service Mesh – Istio / Envoy

Testing BookInfo app with a single review version

First let’s test the BookInfo app with a single review version.

Continue reading “Policy Enforcement in Service Mesh – Istio / Envoy”

Service Mesh 101 – Getting familiar with Istio and Envoy

Introducing Service Mesh

Continue reading “Service Mesh 101 – Getting familiar with Istio and Envoy”

Cloud Native App Dev Series…

Welcome to the Cloud Native App Dev Series. We built and constantly maintain this space to help others get up to speed with Cloud Native App Dev technologies and discover the power of Autonomous Cloud Services.

Kubernetes:
- Containers 101: Learn how to containerise and ship your applications to Kubernetes using Docker
- Kubernetes 101: Get familiar with Kubernetes architecture and components.
- Kubernetes Dashboard: Deep dive into the Kubernetes dashboard components and concepts.
- Provision Kubernetes: Learn how to install Kubernetes locally or in the Cloud.
- Microservices Deployments 101: Learn how to deploy your Microservices into Kubernetes.
- Cheeses App – Self-Healing and Scalability: Discover how simple it is to run and scale your microservices in Kubernetes.
- Socks-shop Polyglot App: Play with a polyglot-based microservices application in Kubernetes.
- (Work in progress…) Roll out your Microservices: Learn how to roll out and roll over your Applications in Kubernetes
- (Work in progress…) Operators and Service Broker: Learn how to consume other Cloud Services as native Kubernetes workloads.
Serverless:
- (Work in progress…) Serverless 101: Get up to speed with Serverless.
Service Mesh (Istio and Envoy):
- Service Mesh 101: Get familiar with Service Mesh, using technologies like Istio and Envoy.
- Policy Enforcement: Learn how to enforce simple routing policies in Service Mesh.
- Circuit Breaker – Network-Latency based routing. Learn how to enforce more complex Service Mesh routing policies, based on network latency.
PaaS:
- Build Modern Web development: Use Autonomous Visual Builder to construct modern Web UIs in minutes
- Autonomous Data Warehouse 101: Learn how to provision Autonomous Data Warehouse in minutes. Load millions of records in seconds and visually analyse the data.
- (Work in progress…) Running Visualization on Autonomous Data Warehouse: Learn how to connect Data Visualizer to Autonomous Data Warehouse.
- Chatbot Development: Learn how to build chatbots in the Cloud.
- (Work in progress…) Blockchain 101: Get familiar with Blockchain concepts and use cases.

Congratulations!!! You have enough to start building your own Cloud Native Applications.

We will keep publishing interesting topics, so you better stay tuned! If you have suggestions for new topics, please contact me directly via https://www.linkedin.com/in/citurria/

Thanks for your time.

*Special thanks to Cameron Senese for being a great mentor and a Cloud warrior, helping us demystify the exciting world of Kubernetes and Microservices… As we keep demystifying technologies and patterns, we are going to keep adding interesting topics, so you better stay tuned!