RedThunder.Blog

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.

Make CSVs into APIs (+ More)

This is going to be quick. This is not a “war and peace”. Over the next few days, there will be converging on the #SmartCities hosted by Hackmakers- Friday, June 4 – Tuesday June 8 (07:30 EST | 17:00 IST | 19:30 SGT | 21:30 AEST). You can find more details (here). There was an ask at the previous hackathon which was which instigated this piece of work:

How might I create an API from a CSV dataset?

Getting Insights with OCI Audit Log with Logging Analytics (via Service Connector)

Recently Clay Magouyrk, EVP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure engineering announced the new Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform.

The new platform will provide OCI native integration to provide operational insights into our OCI services in addition to previous capabilities available in Oracle Management Cloud. Logging Analytics is the first major Oracle Management Cloud Service to be incorporated, and so my fellow colleague @callanhp and I were itching to give it a go and see how we could implement it, so we chose the most available logs we could think of, the audit logs from the OCI control plane.

In this blog we will discuss the mechanics for forwarding OCI Audit Logs to the Logging Analytics service from the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management platform, and discuss how this pattern can be extended to other log sources.

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

Enterprise Manager (EM) Reports using Grafana

Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) repository has a wealth of operational data (for host, database, middleware, apps and engineered systems) that it collects including configuration and metrics. By using Grafana, you can tap into that data to get Rich Analytics and Visualisations for Reporting.

Let’s have a look at how you can do this.

This assumes you already have an EM deployment running.

The following is a summary of steps to enable EM reporting using Grafana:

1. Review the EM App for Grafana Certification
2. Install Grafana OS Package
3. Deploy EM App for Grafana Plugin
4. Configure EM for Grafana Settings
5. Enable Network Rules for Grafana Console
6. Configure Grafana Data Source
7. Access Dashboards

This Is A #TeamTribute

With everything that has been executed for the #WorldInnovationDay Hackathon, the primary focus has been to support the participants. Hence, I want to pay tribute to the participants and teams that we’ve been able to support along the way. Each person came into this event with a different goal in mind – some wanted to learn, some wanted to connect with others, some wanted to build a business. To continue with this support, this is my ask:

If you can help a team or an individual, please reach out.

#ThankYou To The Mentors

At the #WorldInnovationDay Hackathon, Apr 16-19 saw many participants and teams come together to progress the agenda around the United Nations #SustainableDevelopmentGoals. I’ve previously wrote about this hackathon – you can check these articles about the technology (here) and about the event (here).

#WorldInnovationDay Tech Showcase

April 16-19 saw people from across the world come together to focus on three Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the #WorldInnovationDay Hackathon. This blog highlights the technologies used to help accelerate the team’s execution. If you want to read more about the event itself – check out this previous blog (here).

Over the course of the weekend, Oracle Cloud tenancies with $500 USD credits were provided to each participant to use. It was not mandated that they use Oracle Cloud nor was it given to participants automatically. It was encouraging to see people open to explore and learn with Oracle Cloud. I want to thank the Oracle mentors supported the participants ensuring that whilst the teams explored, they could confidently execute and deliver. Here are the common requests from teams and the cloud services that they used over the weekend.

#WorldInnovationDay In Review

#CommunityMatters #ItTakesAVillage #ReshapeTheFuture

What started on April 16th and finished on April 19th was the #WorldInnovationDay Hackathon. ~4000 people in attendance in Slack (organisers, mentors, participants and observers). At the time of writing this, there was the overpowering feeling of exhaustion and contentment with what has just transpired. (I will write another blog about some of the technology used). Let’s review some of what I saw as a Lead Mentor.

Free WordPress on OCI

GOT EASIER … with Oracle Resource Manager

I’ll keep this short … I recently came across an update to one of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Quick Starts for WordPress. The specific addition that caught my eye was a micro deployment of WordPress – 1 x VM and 2 x Docker images (check out the repo here). I looked at that and thought:

This Terraform package would be good for Always Free Tier

Which it was, downloading the repository and created an Oracle Resource Manager Stack (learn more here) and applied the stack. And within minutes, I had a working instance of WordPress.

Yes – it is a single instance.
Yes – I could have built something that was more secured.
Yes – I could have built something that was more scalable – using MySQL Database Service or Oracle Kubernetes Engine.

But putting this altogether, I spent less than 10 mins on this and I can get going. And it is Always Free. The nice this is that I know that this model can expand as it requires (and only when I need to).

I thought about this for the upcoming hackathon too #WorldInnovationDay (https://hackmakers.com) where people are wanting a site to display their solutions. This is a way of doing it and keep it as part of their portfolio.

If you need an environment to try this out – head to the following link and sign-up. https://www.oracle.com/au/cloud/free/. If you are part of the hackathon, we are giving participants a promotion with $500USD credits into a new tenancy and no credit card. Try this out for yourself.