This is going to be quick. This is not a “war and peace”. Over the next few days, there will be converging on the #SmartCities hosted by Hackmakers- Friday, June 4 – Tuesday June 8 (07:30 EST | 17:00 IST | 19:30 SGT | 21:30 AEST). You can find more details (here). There was an ask at the previous hackathon which was which instigated this piece of work:
Continue reading “Make CSVs into APIs (+ More)”How might I create an API from a CSV dataset?
Each of us will read this from our own perspective. Equally diverse are the outcomes and the actions that you might want to take away from this. So, I ask you: Be open. Find the opportunity. And execute.
This is something that we’ve built for the purposes of an infrastructure demonstration of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The code is available in an open public github repository and we’ve written articles on specific capabilities. We are open to collaborate in building more scenarios which allows this demonstration to scale.
Continue reading “Welcome To The OCI Arcade”We welcome you to the OCI Arcade
What started on April 16th and finished on April 19th was the #WorldInnovationDay Hackathon. ~4000 people in attendance in Slack (organisers, mentors, participants and observers). At the time of writing this, there was the overpowering feeling of exhaustion and contentment with what has just transpired. (I will write another blog about some of the technology used). Let’s review some of what I saw as a Lead Mentor.
Continue reading “#WorldInnovationDay In Review”Adding security over the APIs across multiple layers was something that we considered when putting this project together. This perspective was reinforced at the #DigitalDefence hackathon in Nov 2020. Check out what happened (here).
Here we will focus on the different REST APIs exposing the data hosted by Autonomous Data Warehouse. We started off with HTTP Basic Authentication but quickly turned to using OAuth. Here we’ll explore more about the OAuth side and how to get that started.
Continue reading “Adding OAuth to ORDS”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).
Continue reading “Serverless on Always Free Tier with fnproject”Sadly log file identifier icsdiagnosticlog has been deprecated from late November 2020. icsflowlog, icsauditlog are still available so you should be able to apply the same pattern used in this blog to manage your OIC instance log file.
I would like to show how OIC log management can be achieved with OCI Object Storage (I’ll call it bucket) and OCI Logging Analytics, Visual Builder Studio (used to be Developer Cloud, I’ll call it VB Studio).
Interestingly I’m not going to use OIC to download log files, either to ingest log data from OCI Object Storage. VB Studio will be my tool to do sourcing log files and feeding it to bucket – I’ll be taking advantage of unix shell and oct-cli from VB Studio. Then OCI Logging Analytics will ingest log data from bucket based on cloud event.
Continue reading “OIC Log Management with VB Studio, OCI Bucket and OCI Logging Analytics”Between the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Audit Service recording administrative operations and Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) tracking access and user management events, Oracle Cloud provides pretty comprehensive tracking of security events. Recently however, I have been in conversations with a number of organisations who have been seeking longer term retention of audit events for several different reasons, including governance, compliance and forensic requirements. The OCI Audit service supports requesting bulk export of audit events to Object Storage, which allows you manage the retention and archiving of those events yourself, so I started wondering if I could do the same for the IDCS access events. A bit of testing and some simple coding later, and I had events being pulled directly from the IDCS Audit Events API periodically and sent to Object Storage for retention.
In this blog post, I will provide this code as a sample, and discuss some of the techniques and technologies that are available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to enable simple, but highly secure and cost-effective, automation of cross-service tasks such as this.
Continue reading “Simple, Secure Log Retention using OCI Services”Version 1.0.0 of the Consumer Data Right standard was released in September, and it introduces a common set of Banking APIs in line with Australian government legislation. The principles behind the standards design are very solid, though the some of the specific requirements are pretty wild and they result in a bit of rethinking of some of the classical API conventions. The most prominent example of this is the approach the CDR standards take towards ‘object identifiers’, in the ID Permanence section, and I considered the requirements for this interesting enough to spend some time thinking about and documenting.
In this context, an ‘object identifier’ refers to the way in which you refer to an individual instance of an object from your API, such as the ‘accountId’ in the following URI:
GET /banking/accounts/{accountId}
In this blog post we will look at what the CDR requires for these types of identifiers, and provide some sample code which implements the obfuscation requirements specified in the standard.
Continue reading “Consumer Data Right (CDR) – User-specific Identifiers for ID Permanence”In a previous blog, I showed how to develop microservices to connect to Autonomous Databases and consume data (read/write) via REST APIs. Although I still highly recommend that approach, the reality is that there is an easier way to do it using Oracle REST Data Services modules that come included with any Oracle Autonomous Database (ADW/ATP).
This way you simply have to:
That’s pretty much it, this should be a very quick, yet powerful alternative to building your own microservices to consume data from Autonomous DBs.
Continue reading “Enabling REST APIs to consume data from Oracle Autonomous Databases (ADW/ATP)”
Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure has been designed in an API-first manner, which is awesome for all sorts of infrastructure automation tasks. It also implements an interesting API security model, in which all requests must be signed using a private key, associated with a public key which has already been configured in OCI (here, the developers are showing their infrastructure roots, as this echoes how SSH Auth is normally handled). The documentation of this model provides sample code in a number of languages, which is perfect if you are writing automation scripts, but is a little inflexible for ad-hoc testing. Typically I much prefer to use a rich graphical REST client, such a Postman, so that I can easily tweak my parameters and try out different types of calls before I write any code. Unfortunately while Postman is well equipped for Basic and Token based Auth, HTTP-Signature is not natively implemented, and rather than abandon Postman for a new tool, I set out to implement it using Postman’s powerful scripting capabilities. In this blog post I provide the result of this, which is a downloadable collection which provides all of the required scripts, and discuss the approach used.
Continue reading “Calling OCI APIs from Postman”
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