Oracle IoT – Working with Sigfox/Thinxtra Devices

How to use the Thinxtra devices and Sigfox network with the Oracle IoT cloud service.

Introduction

There are lots of activities happening today in the world of IoT (Internet of Things). The market is growing at a staggering pace. Oracle, of course, is providing services in this area, mainly to support our many great SaaS applications. Almost every application can benefit from data coming from devices on machines, automobiles, medical devices, human wearables and such. However, there are several issues people face:

How to work with all the various devices.
How to manage the devices and information.
How to integrate these with other systems in the enterprise.
Deployment of devices, configuration, maintenance, versions, upgrades, Etc.

Oracle IoT Cloud service is designed to help with these issues, but it is often overwhelming to get a given device’s data initially into the IoT cloud. Case and point is with the wonderful devices from Thinxtra which uses the Sigfox network.

Continue reading “Oracle IoT – Working with Sigfox/Thinxtra Devices”

Continuous Build of Docker Containers using Docker hub

In the previous article, I mentioned how we can Dockerise a progressive framework based application (Vue). I have made few improvements to the application where I am now able to perform CRUD operations on the client side using AXIOS, based on API’s available from the server side. I wanted to test these incremental features added to the application and imagine executing those docker commands everytime you make a new component/feature available. This is quite a task. So I was looking at ways to automate the task where every time I commit/push the code to GitHub the build happens automatically so that the latest container is ready for deployment. This is where Docker Hub comes to our rescue. Here are the steps for the automated build process:

Continue reading “Continuous Build of Docker Containers using Docker hub”

Teaching How to use Nginx to frontend your backend services with Trusted CA certificates on HTTPS

Now days with the adoption of Serverless architectures, microservices are becoming a great way to breakdown problem into smaller pieces. One situation that is common to find, is multiple backend services running on technologies like NodeJS, Python, Go, etc. that need to be accessible via HTTPS. It is possible to enable these internal microservices directly with SSL over HTTPS, but a cleaner approach is to use a reverse proxy that front ends these microservices and provides a single HTTPS access channel, allowing a simple internal routing.

In this blog, I am showing how simple it is to create this front end with Nginx and leveraging “Let’s encrypt” to generate trusted certificates attached to it, with strong security policies, so that our website can score an A+ on cryptographic SSL tests conducted by third party organizations.

Continue reading “Teaching How to use Nginx to frontend your backend services with Trusted CA certificates on HTTPS”

Dockerising a Vue.js based SPA, ship and run on Oracle Container Cloud Service

In this post, I am going to show how to build and containerize a Vue.js application and let it run on Container Cloud Service (OCCS) using the following steps:

Build a Vue.js Web App
Build Docker image based on the above Vue.js SPA
Push it on Docker-Hub
Create a Service in Oracle Container Cloud Service (OCCS)
Deploy Service (the vue.js app)

Continue reading “Dockerising a Vue.js based SPA, ship and run on Oracle Container Cloud Service”

JWTs? JWKs? ‘kid’s? ‘x5t’s? Oh my!

There are no shortage of acronyms in the security space, and shifting towards centralised-security, rather than perimeter-based-security, has added even more. As I have been playing with solutions around centralised identity services, such as Oracle’s Identity Cloud Service, I have found myself spending more and more time in IETF RFCs in order to understand these concepts. While there is a lot of value in the standards documents, they assume a lot of knowledge and I often found myself wishing for a slightly more approachable, high level description of the elements I was dealing with. While there is something tempting about being part of the secret ‘We read the security RFCs’ club, I resisted this, and took it upon myself to provide this higher level overview of these important concepts.

Continue reading “JWTs? JWKs? ‘kid’s? ‘x5t’s? Oh my!”

Multi Factor Authentication is Critical for Everyone

In today’s environment where systems run in the cloud and so much business and personal activity occurs online, passwords are not strong enough by themselves to protect applications. Scandals about password breaches seem to happen on a regular basis. It’s easy to find many case studies where passwords have been compromised as a result of malware, email scams and other techniques. The key point is that no matter how strong our passwords, no matter how much we educate our users, there will be situations where people are caught off guard and click on the wrong link, look at the wrong email or open the wrong document. Once this happens, our passwords can be compromised.

Continue reading “Multi Factor Authentication is Critical for Everyone”

Building a Docker Image for WebLogic 12.2.1.2 MedRec app

This blog walks you through the steps I used to get WebLogic Server and the MedRec sample application installed into a Docker image. There are many well documented GitHub projects for the Oracle Docker Images. This blog is meant to simply narrow down exactly what I did to get this going in my environment. I was using Ubuntu 16.04, and already had Docker installed.

Continue reading “Building a Docker Image for WebLogic 12.2.1.2 MedRec app”

ACCS Zero Downtime Updates and Re-Deployments

The May 2017 update for ACCS (17.2.3) brought a cool new feature to ACCS, zero-downtime updates. While previously, there was support for performing a rolling restart of an application instance, where each instance would be brought down and updated in turn, this only enabled zero-downtime updates if you had an application running two or more instances, and your application could satisfy performance requirements with one fewer node. While any production system should be able to satisfy these requirements, many of the utility systems I ran were on a single node, and I had to send out an email blast to avoid being disruptive when I wanted to push a quick code fix.

Continue reading “ACCS Zero Downtime Updates and Re-Deployments”

Teaching how to integrate Twitter with Integration Cloud Service

This blog shows you how to use the Twitter ICS Connector that comes out of the box in Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

Obtain your Twitter Connector in ICS

In order to create a Twitter Connector you need to first go to Twitter developers portal and create an access token. For this:

Login to the Twitter Developer portal at https://dev.twitter.com/
ON the top right, click on My apps and follow the link to log in (sign up if you don’t have an account yet).

Continue reading “Teaching how to integrate Twitter with Integration Cloud Service”

Automate ERP Cloud Batch Uploads using Oracle MFT and Integration Cloud Service

In this blog, we will use Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) and Integration Cloud Service (ICS) to automate batch uploads into Oracle ERP Cloud. We will perform this upload with invoices, a typical use-case for organisations that work with numerous vendors and would like their vendors to bulk invoice them through say an SFTP file drop.

Steps are as follows:

Drop the file into an SFTP folder that is managed by MFT
MFT picks it up and uploads it into ERP Cloud’s WebCenter Content file repository
MFT calls ICS to trigger a multi-step orchestration to load ERP Cloud
Using the ICS ERP Cloud adapter, the ICS orchestration first loads the file into staging tables and import the invoice into final tables

Folks who have read my previous blog, Using MFT Cloud Service to Automate HCM Batch Uploads – Part 1 will notice how similar this is to HCM Data Loading, except that we use ICS to orchestrate a few post-load steps.

That is because HCM and ERP Cloud (also SCM and SalesCloud) are all Oracle Fusion Applications, modules built on the same platform. Some of you may even be on “Global Shared Instances”, essentially running both your HCM and ERP SaaSes in the same instance.

Continue reading “Automate ERP Cloud Batch Uploads using Oracle MFT and Integration Cloud Service”