App Dev – RedThunder.Blog

#BuildWithAI 2021 – Another Step

Last weekend (from Friday 29th Oct to Tuesday 2nd Nov), was the #BuildWithAI Hackathon 2021 where participants, mentors, sponsors and organisers gathered together to solve real world challenges with AI. This event does not standalone. In a world full of change, this (from my perspective) started last year in the #BuildWithAI Hackathon 2020 and continued to build.

This article is about the event but the event itself is just “Another Step”.

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.

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.

#DaysOfArm (13 of X)

This is my 13th #DaysOfArm article that tracks some of the experiences that I’ve had so far. And just to recap from the first post (here) on June 12 2021.

It’s been just over 2 weeks since the launch of Ampere Arm deployed in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Check this article out to learn more (here). And it’s been about one week since I started looking into the new architecture and deployment, since I started provisioning the VM.Standard.A1.Flex Compute Shape on OCI and since I started migrating a specific application that has many different variations to it to test it all out.

This is my next learning is another retrospective with the OCI Arcade deployment the full stack is now being deployed on 1 OCPU with 6 GB of RAM in an Always Free Tier tenancy.

Using OCI Burstable Instance

With the work that I’ve been doing with Open Street Map (here), I’ve been provisioning Pelias (here) – an open-source implementation of geocoding. This architecture is not small (consisting of 10+ docker images, and potentially 100+GB of raw geo data) especially if you are looking to geocode the whole world. The workload (or pipeline) had 4 main stages – download, prepare, import and query.

Download – to get the raw data sources
Prepare – to get the raw data into a format that can be easily imported
Import – to import the data into the elastic search (which is the backend)
Query – to accept geocode queries

Each of these stages have different performance characteristics and required different resources. The main thing that I’m looking at here is the use of compute. The need for compute during the prepare and import stages is significantly different from the download and query stages. I’m also not confidently in terms of when or how much I need.

And this is why I configured a burstable instance.

Here’s a couple of things to know …

There is a baseline utilisation OCPU. Consider this as a the minimum compute you want. For my scenario, it was primarily how much compute that I needed for the download and query stages.
There is full utilisation OCPU. Where this is can be 2x or 8x the baseline utilisation. (in the terms of the documentation – the baseline utilisation can be either 12.5% or 50% of the full utilisation OCPU). For my scenario, it was primarily the prepare and import stages that needed the additional compute.
The increased capacity is based upon the CPU utilisation metrics to determine whether to burst.
The average CPU utilisation for the month needs to up to the baseline utilisation OCPU.

Burstable Instances billing is known. It doesn’t come with Bill Shock.

You can find out more about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure burstable instances (here). If you want to try this out yourself or work on your own application, sign-up (here) for the free Oracle Cloud Trial. I’d be interested to hear your experiences and learn from others as well. Leave a comment or contact me at jason.lowe@oracle.com if you want to collaborate.

Minecraft On OCI Arm (Plus)

Over the weekend, I took some inspiration from a few different sources and put this together in action. Taking what Todd Sharp has mentioned on his blog (here) and what I’ve been doing with my #DaysOfArm article series (most recently here) and some of the things that I’ve been doing at home with learning how to code – then this is what’s been able to be achieved and some learnings and differences that I’ve taken with running Minecraft (on Arm).