RedThunder.Blog

What if in the middle of the conversation the user changes mind?

Bots that can survive human contact

User: "Wats PaaS?"

Bot: "Oracle Cloud Platform has the most comprehensive suite of PaaS 
solutions to help you increase business agility and drive innovation in 
the cloud. The most popular are Integration Cloud, Mobile & Chatbots and 
Blockchain"

User: "Oops! I meant SaaS"

Bot: "Oracle Cloud Platform has the most comprehensive suite of [....]

User: "Sure... See you later"

I believe machines are very good at doing repeatable and predictable tasks. Humans by nature are everything but predictable. This is why it takes a lot of work to build a Bot that can survive human contact….

This post is a deep technical dive into sub-intents, System components and how we combine them to build a dialog flow that attempts to maintain a conversation even when the user “goes off script”.

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‘API life Cycle is invalid!’ Error for Oracle API CS API’s

Hi, just thought to post the solution for this error, when I hit this error, searched all over internet couldn’t find any specific blog describing possible cause of getting this error while invoking an API.

Let me give some background. I have created an API using Oracle API Platform Management Portal and when I tried invoking that API using google postman tool I was getting below error –

postmane

This was a silly mistake but worth highlighting. When we create API definition in API Management portal there is tab page “API Implementation” which has configuration field “API Request” where we need to define the API endpoint URL where consumer of this API will send input request. While I was declaring that portion I have given this URL “api/medrec”.

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Oracle API Platform Cloud Service – Installation Steps of Gateway Node

In this blog I am going to document the Oracle API Platform Gateway Node (Version : 18.1.3) Installation steps which is one of the critical components of API Platform Cloud Service.

Oracle provides API Platform Cloud Service as a foundation product for API Management that comprises the Full API Lifecycle, encompassing the complete API Design & Documentation, API Security, Discovery & Consumption, Monetization, and Analysis etc.

Oracle API Platform comprises 3 major components as stated below to serve specific purpose-

Management Portal – This is used to create and manage APIs, deploy APIs to gateways, and manage gateways, and create and manage applications. You can also manage and Deploy APIs and manage gateways with the REST API.

Developer Portal – Application developers subscribe to APIs and get the necessary information to invoke them from this portal.

Gateway Node – This is the security and access control run-time layer for APIs. Each API is deployed to a gateway node from the Management Portal or via the REST API.

In addition to above, Oracle also offer Oracle Apiary to quickly design, prototype, document and test APIs.

Below is the high level architecture diagram of API Platform.

APICS_Arch1

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Teaching How to use Oracle Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS) to front end your APIs

In this blog, I am going to show you how to configure Oracle Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS) to proxy/redirect traffic into multiple APIs. For the sake of this example, I am going to point to running APIs hosted on my Oracle API Gateway, as well as running on a 3^rd party Cloud provider. However, you can use Oracle LBaaS to proxy traffic to any HTTP or HTTPS endpoint(s).

In this example, I am going to consume an existing API that I built some time ago that when invoked returns a random joke. In order to test it in high availability mode, I am also going to configure yet another “jokes” API that will serve as a redundant backend endpoint/API.

This is the high-level view of how Oracle LBaaS can easily enable multiple proxy/redirections to backend APIs hosted across various places:

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Policy Based Multi Factor Authentication

In my previous article, Securing Applications with Multi Factor Authentication I discussed how to roll out basic MFA. While this is great if your requirements are very straightforward, there are times when you’ll need a more sophisticated approach. One of the most common examples that I get asked about is how to challenge users for Multi Factor Authentication only when they are connecting remotely from home or when traveling.

In this article I use an example where the business requirement is to enforce MFA for people in the Customer Relations department who are accessing protected applications when they are not on the corporate network. I’ll explain how to configure policies and rules that allow users connected to the corporate network to login with just their User ID and Password, while users connected remotely will need to use Multi Factor Authentication to access protected applications.

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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:

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Teaching How to push your code into multiple Remote Git repositories

Very quickly Git has become one of the most common ways to maintain and manage source code. It is easy to use, fast, reliable and most modern CI/CD tooling support it. GitHub also makes it easy to anyone who wants to share code, to do it in a free or very inexpensive way. Many companies however, also look for ways in which they can maintain their own private repositories as an enterprise-grade solution, like Developer Cloud Service (DevCS), the one Oracle gives for free with any IaaS or PaaS service.

In this blog I am going to show you how to push your code into any number of remote Git repositories. For example, you can have your private repository in DevCS and choose to also publish them into another GitHub remote repository (public or private) in GitHub.

This is the high-level idea:

Let’s create a new Git repo in DevCS
Let’s create a repo in GitHub
Let’s clone DevCS repo locally on my laptop
Let’s push the code to DevCS Git repo
Let’s push the code to GitHub repo.

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Securing Applications with Multi Factor Authentication

These days, passwords online are not strong enough by themselves to protect applications. Scandals about password breaches seem to happen on a regular basis. This is where Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) greatly reduces the risks associated with protecting information online. Multi Factor Authentication combines something you know (e.g. your password) with something you have (e.g. your smartphone). MFA can be used with SMS or a Mobile App on an iPhone, an Andriod phone or a Windows Phone. Using MFA on a smartphone significantly reduces the costs associated with older and more traditional MFA technologies like physical tokens because of the cost of delivery and administrative overheads.

Oracle Identity Cloud Service allows you to deliver Multi Factor Authentication quickly and easily. In this article I’ll walk through the steps necessary to enable Multi Factor Authentication using Oracle Identity Cloud Service(IDCS). Once MFA is enabled you’ll be able to use MFA with any application protected by your instance of Oracle IDCS. In my example, I’ll use the Oracle Mobile Authenticator App on an iPhone to protect applications as well as the User Self Service Console in IDCS.

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Teaching How to use Terraform to Manage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code is becoming very popular. It allows you to describe a complete blueprint of a datacentre using a high-level configuration syntax, that can be versioned and script-automated. This brings huge improvements in the efficiency and reliability of provisioning and retiring environments.

Terraform is a tool that helps automate such environment provisioning. It lets you define in a descriptor file, all the characteristics of a target environment. Then, it lets you fully manage its life-cycle, including provisioning, configuration, state compliance, scalability, auditability, retirement, etc.

Terraform can seamlessly work with major cloud vendors, including Oracle, AWS, MS Azure, Google, etc. In this blog, I am going to show you how simple it is to use it to automate the provisioning of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure from your own laptop/PC. For this, we are going to use Vagrant on top of VirtualBox to virtualise a Linux environment to then run Terraform on top, so that it doesn’t matter what OS you use, you can quickly get started.

This is the high-level idea:

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Teaching how to use Vagrant to simplify building local Dev and Test environments

The adoption of Cloud and modern software automation, provisioning and delivery techniques, are also requiring a much faster way to simplify the creation and disposal of Dev and Test environments. A typical lifespan of a Dev environment can go from minutes to just a few days and that’s it, we don’t need it anymore.

Regardless of whether you use a Windows, Apple or Linux based PC/laptop, virtualisation of environments via Virtual Machines, help with this problem, besides it leaves your host OS clean. Vagrant takes VMs to the next level, by offering a very simple, lightweight and elegant solution to simplify such Virtual Machine life-cycle management, easy way to bootstrap your software/libraries requirements and sharing files across your host and guest machines.

In this blog I am going to show you how to get started with Vagrant. You will find it a very useful to quickly create and destroy virtual environments that help you develop and test your applications, demystify a particular topic, connecting to cloud providers, run scripts, etc.

For example, typical scenarios I use Vagrant for include: Dev and Test my NodeJS Applications, deploy and test my Applications on Kubernetes, run shell scripts, SDKs, use CLIs to interact with Cloud providers e.g. Oracle, AWS, Azure, Google, etc. All of this from my personal laptop, without worrying about side effects, i.e. if I break it, I can simply dispose the VM and start fresh.