Microservices – RedThunder.Blog

Certificate expiry monitoring in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

I’m sure we’ve all experienced it, either as a user, or as a system administrator. You know, that important SSL certificate everyone forgot about so didn’t renew, and now has expired?

When an SSL/TLS certificate expires it can create a number of problems, including:

Users’ web browsers will display warning messages, indicating that the website’s connection is not secure. This can lead to a loss of trust and deter user engagement.
API clients will often refuse to establish a connection if an SSL certificate is not valid potentially disrupting crucial data exchanges and integrations.
Search engines may flag the site as unsafe, leading to a drop in rankings and reduced organic traffic.

Also regularly encountering certificate warnings conditions users to accept future certificate errors, which makes them more likely to accept an SSL certificate warning should they be targeted in a Man In The Middle Attack.

To avoid these issues, it’s important to have enough advance warning that a certificate is going to expire so you can obtain a new one, install, and test it thoroughly.

If you’re already using Domain Validated (DV) certificates, such as those issued by Let’s Encrypt you might want to consider my automated Let’s Encryption Solution. This solution automatically handles the entire certificate lifecycle using serverless functions inside OCI. For those who prefer to bring their own certificates, these can be imported into OCI’s certificate service.

As at June 2023, certificate expiry monitoring in OCI is primarily focused on certificates associated with Load Balancers. To improve monitoring, I’ve developed a serverless solution that examines all certificates expiration dates. The solution emits logs and sends email notifications, also allowing for customisable lead time to align with your organisation’s certificate procurement process. Logs can also be forwarded to your SIEM solution if required.

#DaysOfArm (15 of X)

This is my 15th #DaysOfArm article that tracks some of the experiences that I’ve had so far. It’s been a little while since I’ve worked on this series however saying that … much of what I’ve been doing didn’t seem different from any other type of environment.

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 where I looked into Let’s Encrypt to create a set of free certificates for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure A1.Flex VM Instances.

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).

#DaysOfArm (14 of X)

This is my 14th #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.

This is my next learning where I’ve deployed successfully openrouteservice – an open-source routing / direction API all deployed on an 4 OCPU with 24 GB of RAM in an Always Free Tier tenancy.

#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.

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.

#DaysOfArm (12 of X)

This is my 12th #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.

This is my next learning where I’ve deployed successfully Pelias – an open-source geocode API all deployed on an 4 OCPU with 24 GB of RAM in an Always Free Tier tenancy.

(Update – 11th Oct 2021 – there’s been some changes made as this is a working document … as some of the packages have changed as well as additional fixes to make it easier …)

(Update – 28th Dec 2022 – I’ve refreshed the instructions for this blog post to match what is happening with Pelias as there’s been some cool changes to support arm64).

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.

Get OCI Arcade Free on Arm

There’s been numerous announcements about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) adding Arm-based Compute to the list of Virtual Machine (VM) Shapes. Check some of the announcements (here) and (here).

You can also watch it (here) too with Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Note: The link above has more content and videos.

Have you seen the OCI Arcade? We have built the architecture deployable on OCI Always Free Tier.

Recently in the OCI Always Free Tier, an additional services has been added to include 4 cores and 24 GB of RAM of Ampere A1 Compute. With this additional capacity, it made sense for OCI Arcade to be ported to this A1 Compute Shape. Here is what we did and why.

Welcome To The OCI Arcade

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.

We welcome you to the OCI Arcade

#WorldInnovationDay Hack Information Pack

We are providing to each participant access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for the hackathon. The following resources are to make you effective with OCI.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

From past hackathons, we noticed a trend of what technologies and services are being used by the winning teams. Here are the top resources with some additional references.

For a single platform to store JSON, Graph & Spatial, perform ML or deliver Low-Code Apps, use Autonomous Database (here)
For establishing infrastructure with your OS of choice, use OCI Compute (here)
For Jupyter notebooks and ML packages, use Data Science Cloud (here)
For quick self-service and data visualisation, use Analytics Cloud (here)
For making sure everything is secured, use Oracle Security (here)
For most things you need for #AppDev, use Oracle AppDev (here)

Live Labs

You will need to learn quickly. These hands-on workshops will help you learn more about the services available.

For those who are interested in a single platform to store data (here)
For those who want to #lowcode (here)
For adding Blockchain to your datasets (here)
For those who are interested in data science (here)
For ML on datasets in the database (here)
For data storytelling with data visualisation (here)
For building microservices applications (here)

Next Steps

There will be a series of workshops where we will be present on different OCI topics in the week leading up to the hackathon. Make sure you have these in your calendar so you don’t miss out.

And reach out on the #WorldInnovationDay Hack 2021 Slack workspace if you need anything from the team.