Provisioning – RedThunder.Blog

#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.

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’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).

#DaysOfArm (11 of X)

This is my 11th #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 which I focuses on Arm’s availability in our cloud.

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.

Turning a Compartment into a ORM Stack

Effective first, then efficient and then elegant …
Peter Laurie – mate and mentor.

I’ve been doing some collaboration with @stantanev around a project and part of the contribution that I was doing was getting some stuff setup / configured and deployed into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This wasn’t a standard copy-and-paste scenario. I was building it up as we went. And then I was done … But it felt unfinished because I didn’t want to just leave it there. I wanted to share what I have without me getting sucked into other work standing up new environments (noting in the last article – I am lazy). And in the first instance, I only had dev (where I was working) and I needed to create a new one so people can start experiencing what we delivered (quickly).

What I invested in was using Oracle Resource Manager “ORM” to help me take what I built in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and turn that into something that I could hand-over. Let’s have a look.

Automating with OCI Oracle Resource Manager

I use this because I’m lazy.

This is true. After doing something that is repetitive because either I’m testing or incrementally improving what is happen, I get frustrated. So, I automate. In this scenario, here I have an application that I’ve been working with a few people (like @stantanev), and as such spending a little bit of time automating the provisioning of the stack made sense. I value my time as I value other people’s time.

Oracle Resource Manager (ORM) is part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and is available in all tiers – Trials, Always Free Tier, Pay-As-You-Go or with Universal Credits. In short – EVERYONE gets it. The easiest way that I think of ORM, is that its a managed Terraform service within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment. Let’s talk a look at it.

Teaching How to Provision Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) with Cloud Stack and Terraform

We have covered multiple blogs on how to use Terraform to help automate the provisioning of environments and treat your Infrastructure as Code. Until now, for PaaS stacks, we have used Terraform together with Oracle PaaS Service Manager (PSM) CLI. This gives us great flexibility to script our own tailored PaaS stacks the way we want them. However, with flexibility comes responsibility, and in this case, if we choose to use PSM CLI, it’s up to us to script the whole provisioning/decommission of components that make up the stack. As well as what to do if we encounter an error half-way through, so that we leave things consistently.

A simpler way to provision PaaS stacks is by making use of Oracle Cloud Stack, that treats all components of the stack as a single unit, where all sub-components are provisioned/decommissioned transparently for us. For example, Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) stack, is made of Oracle DB Cloud Service (DBCS), Integration Cloud Service (ICS), Process Cloud Service (PCS), Visual Builder Cloud Service (VBCS), IaaS, storage, network, etc. If we use Oracle Cloud Stack to provision an environment, we only have to pass a YAML template with the configuration of the whole stack and then, Cloud Stack handles the rest. Pretty awesome huh?

Similarly, as we have done in the past, we are going to use a “Build Server”. This will be used as a platform to help us provision our PaaS stacks. When provisioning this “Build Server”, I will add all the tooling it requires as part of its bootstrap process. For this, I am using Vagrant + Terraform, so that I can also treat my “Build Server” as “infrastructure as code” and I can easily get rid of it, after I built my target PaaS stack.

This is a graphical view of what I will be doing in this blog to provision an OIC stack via Cloud Stack:

Continue reading “Teaching How to Provision Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) with Cloud Stack and Terraform”

Teaching How to use Oracle PaaS Service Manager (PSM) CLI to Provision Oracle PaaS environments

In this blog, I am going to get you started with Oracle PaaS Service Manager (PSM) CLI – A great tool to manage anything API-enabled on any Oracle PaaS Service or Stack. For example, provisioning, scaling, patching, backup, restore, start, stop, etc.

It has the concept of Stack (multiple PaaS services), what means that you can very easily provision and manage full Stacks, such as Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC), that combines multiple PaaS solutions underneath, e.g. ICS, PCS, VBCS, DBCS, etc.

For this, we are going to use a pre-cooked Vagrant Box/VM that I prepared for you, so that you don’t have to worry about installing software, but moving as quickly as possible to the meat and potatoes.

This is a graphical view of what we are going to do: