Author: Martin Linxfeld

How to build microservice which is based on OCI Function and ATP with Terraform

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

A lot of people around the world believe the serverless approach is the ultimate future of cloud computing. I am also such a believer, but it will be a gradual move, sort of evolution within the next couple of years. Some time ago I have published a blog about private endpoints for ATP. I have used the code related to this blog post and I have refactored it a bit. The idea behind was to eliminate VM-based web server with Flask microservice. This old school technology could be replaced by OCI Function and API Gateway (btw. check Kranthi blog post). I guess this refactoring has been pretty successful. Below in this 15 minutes video, you will see my hard work on this topic. Hope it will be tasty 🙂

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.

How to use OCI Marketplace image with Terraform?

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

Recently Mattia has presented the blog post about using OCI CLI to retrieve OCI Marketplace image. It has inspired me to explore this topic, but with Terraform usage. The goal was very simple – deploy RocketChat image (from OCI Marketplace) as a single VM in the extremely simplified cloud infrastructure, very similar to my first lesson of OCI + Terraform tutorial. I have invested 3 hours and here is the outcome of this work. I hope you will find it tasty, despite the fact it is a really tricky setup, with many dependent resources and data sources.

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.

My thoughts after successful Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Developer 2020 Certified Associate exam

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

mattia_rossi_oci_certified_solution_architect_associate_2018Last week I was very busy so it was hard to find a few free cycles to write about it. Yes, I have passed recently Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Developer 2020 Certified Associate exam. Frankly speaking, it was obvious for me I need to do it. I am a hardcore developer here at FoggyKitchen, mostly with Terraform, but I am also writing a lot of stuff in Ansible for Oracle, for example, Ansible-Database-Migration-Tool (ADMT). You are probably curious if this certification is important and if it is worth spending time on it. Well… I guess it is. The modern world is changing like crazy. Especially now during the COVID-19 outbreak, which transforms business in an extremely fast way. I have heard that recently some big CEO has told that staying away from the cloud today would be like planing to extinct soon. Maybe this is too radical for me, but it gives a sense of mindset shift and technological revolution we are approaching today. I am not sure how it looks like at your place, but in my location, in Poland, after full lockdown, all educational activities have been moved from analog to digital. The teachers must deliver e-schooling via Zoom or on the other platforms. On the other hand, the shops are adapting very quickly to provide a nice and easy e-commerce experience with the delivery of all goodies at your footsteps in your house. For example, I was shocked it wasn’t possible to buy new shoes in the mall for my kids (full lockdown means malls are closed). The spring has approached and their feet were just bigger. There were no excuses. I have done it via e-shop…

And here is a big question. Who will build this brand new world of e-shops, e-schools, e-something, etc? There will be a massive need for cloud developers. The army of flexible programmers capable to utilize all of the features of the modern clouds. That is is why it is worth spending time on this topic – learn about OCI Event Services and OCI Functions,  explore OCI API Gateway, Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE),  OCI Autonomous Databases and  OCI Web Application Firewall (WAF). And of course, it is a good idea to get skills and hands-on experience with Terraform (here is my tutorial).

What do you think about it? I am very excited about your feedback in this field…

One more thing… Please remember to subscribe FoggyKitchen YT channel. 🙂

Martin, The Cook.

How to integrate OCI Event Service and OCI Functions with Terraform

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

Yesterday night I have passed  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Developer 2020 Certified Associate exam. For this exam, besides Terraform, I had to learn about Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) and OCI Functions. Recently I have had the opportunity to explore OCI Event Service. The outcome of this experiment I have encoded in a brand new dish (GitHub repo here). The idea is simple. Successful execution of the manual backup of compute instance’s block volume or boot volume leads to automatically populated tagging information, replicated to backup resource from the corresponding volume resource. Worth to add that for automated volumes backup, recently this feature has been implemented natively in OCI, but for manual backups, we are still waiting for this feature. My best guess here is we can treat this experiment for now as a foundation for further experiments in your kitchen. So please, treat is as a toy, just for fun 🙂

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.

My thoughts after successful Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2019 Certified Architect Professional exam

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

mattia_rossi_oci_certified_solution_architect_professional_2019Right, last 2 weeks I was silent. I am so sorry about that, but believe me… I had to focus on 1Z0-997 final preparation. It was a really hard exam. Mostly because of the wide range of topics to be explored in detail. On one hand, I was sure about my knowledge after building my Terraform+OCI tutorial plus some howtos for OCI compute autoscaling or OKE deployment. But frankly speaking still there was a lot of things where I was not fully familiar or let’s say I have forgotten details after a few months with no practicing. So if you ask me how to pass this exam the answer is rather simple. You need to put yourself in front of your computer and watch all videos which are available at Oracle University (OU).  Although I guess it is also good to practice with Terraform for most of the OCI services and not count only on theoretical knowledge from learning paths in OU. I have been also asked many times about brain dumps usage… well… honestly speaking I am not a big fan of that approach. Mostly because it is just a shortcut approach. Learning answers for the particular set of questions will not make you capable of architecting OCI cloud topologies for the real customers. You need to know all of the topics well. This is the only way to be really professional. I know it is hard, especially when there is no time, but this is only way 🙂 Good luck on your exams! I know from Rohit’s message that OCI certs are now extremely popular! It is another sign that our OCI community is growing! :)))

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.

TF_VAR variables – how to collect it from the OCI Cloud Console…

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

Recently one of my subscribers has asked me about this topic. How to collect all TF_VAR variables values for Terraform OCI Provider before starting into the first lesson? A small thing, but very important, right? In this short video, I am explaining how to do it step by step 🙂 BTW. I have added this video to my Terraform OCI course.

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.

 

 

How to clone ATP in OCI…

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

About the flexibility of ATP instances in OCI I have written so far two times. For the first time, it was just a short ride to show how it easy to create this autonomous database in OCI. For the second time, I have shown a new feature of ATP – Private Endpoint. It means ATP instance will be completely separated from the public Internet and visible exclusively in the private subnet. Today I will show you yet another feature of ATP. Now you can quickly clone ATP instance. You can do it in two different ways. The basic is just a clone from the existing instance. A more sophisticated clone is based on ATP automatic backups. In the video below you can watch both use-cases coded with Terraform. I hope it will be a tasty thing as previous recordings 🙂

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.