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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI Gen-2 Cloud Security – Part II (Identity and Access Management)

In my previous blog post Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI Gen-2 Cloud Security – Part I , I have discussed the seven pillars of information security upon which Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI (Oracle Gen-2 Cloud) is built. The cloud shared security and responsibility model was discussed along with the concepts such as Regions, Availability Domains and Fault Domains. This part discusses the Identity and Access Management for OCI. It provides authentication and authorisation for all the OCI resources and services.

An enterprise can use single tenancy shared by various business units, teams, and individuals while maintaining the necessary security, isolation, and governance, and this post will go into the concepts involved in this.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI Gen-2 Cloud Security – Part I

Previously, I have discussed Oracle’s overall information security portfolio in blog entry – Oracle Information Security – Where it begins, Where it ends. It was pertaining to information security in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Classic and On-Premises suite of products including Identity and Access Management and Database Security.

In a series of five blog posts, I am going to cover the security concepts in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (aka OCI or Oracle Gen-2 Cloud). The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a trusted enterprise cloud platform that offers customers deep control with unmatched security. It provides Oracle customers with effective and manageable security to confidently run their mission-critical workloads and store their data.

AUSOUG Connect 2018 – Talking Dev

In November 2018, I had the privilege to attend the Australian Oracle User Group national conference “#AUSOUG Connect” in Melbourne. My role was to have video interviews with as many of the speakers and exhibitors at the conference. Overall, 10 interviews over the course of the day, 90 mins of real footage, 34 short clips to share and plenty of hours reviewing and post-editing to capture the best parts.

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Oracle Engagement Cloud Event Processing using Sales Cloud Adapter within Oracle Integration Cloud !!!

Recently, I been part of one POC where I have learned how we can consume Business Events from Oracle Engagement Cloud.

Oracle Engagement Cloud is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering from Oracle which provides unified Sales and Service Capabilities, includes sales force automation to manage the full sales lifecycle including leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities, assets, activities, assessments, and forecasts. Leverage content on mobile, the web, and email applications etc.

Beneath the hood, there are several business object e.g. Account, Contact, Plan, Opportunity, service request etc. which form the data model to store data in back-end and exchange data with other systems.

In this blog, I will be simply demonstrating the prerequisite which are required to configure inside Oracle Engagement Cloud and OIC Sales Cloud Adapter configuration.

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Visual Builder Cloud Service – Dynamic Elements

I’ve been using VBCS for awhile now and it has really evolved over the past nine months. I guess that’s one of the wonderful things about these PaaS offerings from Oracle; we don’t have to wait so long for new features and capabilities.

One thing I wanted to do, but it isn’t directly supported in VBCS yet, is to have dynamic displays. I’ve done quite a bit of programming in native JavaScript and Oracle JET where I’ve used web sockets to make my graphs and gauges change automatically without the need for a refresh button.

Well, I figured out a way to do this in VBCS. Now I will admit right away, this is pretty ugly, so if you are a software development purist, please turn off your TV now!

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Teaching How to Generate Wildcard SSL Certificates for your LBaaS

Security is super important, but also annoying. From a backend developer mindset, all I want is to build great services exposed as APIs that the world can consume with ease. The problem is that in most cases, consumption of my endpoints will be blocked by browsers and other tools/client unless they are exposed as HTTPS with valid SSL certificates.

In this blog, I am going to show you how to use Let’s Encrypt to create your own “Wildcard SSL Certificate” for your existing domain, for example: *.mydomain.com – Then I am going to show you how to assign this certificate to your Oracle LBaaS Listener endpoint.

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Oracle MFT – OIC Integration

Even in a day and age where event-based and real-time data exchange is prevalent and growing, the truth is there are still massive amounts of data exchanged using file transfer mechanisms. Oracle has always played in this realm, but with limited success. The Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) application is pretty good, but nothing to write home about… or write a blog about! 😀

One reason is because moving files around and using FTP servers is not very glamorous. Another reason is because the Oracle MFT management dashboard is pretty limited. It is able to monitor various aspects of a file transfer, report success or failure and allow you to resend files. But it has no business context or the ability to understand how a file might be part of a larger business process.

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Teaching How to Get Started with Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE)

In a previous blog, I explained how to provision a Kubernetes cluster locally on your laptop (either as a single node with minikube or a multi-node using VirtualBox), as well as remotely in the Oracle Public Cloud IaaS. In this blog, I am going to show you how to get started with Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). OKE is a fully-managed, scalable, and highly available service that you can use to deploy your containerized applications to the cloud on Kubernetes.

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.

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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: