NewStuff series – dynamic VM shape resize in OCI with Terraform

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

I am trying to follow constantly updated release notes of OCI. Nearly every single day we have something new there, so sometimes it really hard to follow all of the news there. To read some theory is great, but test it is even greater… and harder, to be honest. So I was thinking it would be great to have a chance to watch this kind of testing on YouTube, especially with Terraform OCI Provider usage. To be sure Provider has been updated and it follows OCI’s Rest API changes. And you know what? I haven’t found such videos on YT! So…? So I have decided to record my own one. Pretty short in form. Just 3-5 minutes long. And here is the first one. It is about a new compute instance feature – dynamic VM shape resize. No more compute instance migration, no more compute instance re-provisioning. Just a couple of minutes to restart. And that is all! This elasticity is great!

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.

How to create shared block volume in OCI with Terraform

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

Yeah! That is the feature which I really like. Shared block volume attached to more than one compute instances. This feature has been announced in OCI in the middle of December 2019. One month later I have decided to test it with Terraform. I was hoping it would work not only in the OCI Console but also with my favorite automation runtime. So I have written this simple repo in GitHub. Worth to add I am not finishing the code at the moment of attachment between compute instances and volume block resource. I am including Terraform files that execute null_resources which are building OCFS2 on top of the volume which is visible as a device via iSCSI protocol. Most of the knowledge of how to do it have incorporated from this blog post. I think you can find my dish tasty and you can somehow reutilize this code in the future 🙂

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.

Building community …

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

I guess everybody knows it is important, but it is really difficult to start. I mean to share knowledge, then receive feedback from the followers, and ultimately stay there blogging with further efforts long term. That is the way to build a community and it is for sure hard. My idea was simple… to build the geeks community focused on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) paradigm. During the last few days, I have received a lot of positive feedback about my course and generally about this site. So it looks like my idea is valid and relevant. Now I am thinking about the future. And I am sure about one important thing. Writing alone, being a singleton, will not work efficiently. So what? So I am looking for the others, ready to join and collab here. For all IaC fans ready to join this site I have stickers! :-))) … If interested somehow, please drop me an e-mail at martin.linxfeld@foggykitchen.com. 🙂

Martin, The Cook.

Dinner for tonight – ATP again :)

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

More then a year ago in this post, I have initiated OCI ATP provisioning topic. After a year I have rewritten the whole repo. Not only because HCL 0.12 is a formal standard now, and all Terraform code was outdated. I have done it also because I feel it is good in general to re-test everything and verify how it works nowadays. On the other hand, after my last course for Terraform, I have found myself confident enough to record videos for blog posts like this one. That is why you can also find a short movie below. 🙂

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.

How to use Terraform and OCI – last lesson 8

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

This short course, my first tutorial is going to finish… I believe we have achieved good taste of our dish, right! 🙂 Last time in lesson 7 we have created a database with OCI DBSystem. In this last lesson, we will add local VCN peering which is documented here. I hope you have found all of my lessons interesting. I am really curious about your general feedback meaning what was good or great or maybe what was missing and should be added in some form in the future (course update or additional recordings). In case of any questions, you can drop me an email at martin.linxfeld@foggykitchen.com.

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.

How to use Terraform and OCI – lesson 7

Posted on by Martin Linxfeld

Oracle is well known for its database, for more than 30 years, meaning for many people on the market, the term database means Oracle and long, long nothing else. Until now in our lessons, we were far from the database. Instead, we were covering cloud networking (VCN, subnets, route tables, load balancers), security (security lists) and ultimately VMs (for web tier). Now it is a time for Oracle RDBMS database! In lesson 7 we will add DBSystem, which is Oracle’s PaaS offering. It is really simple. I guess this soup will taste fantastic!

Bon Appetit,

Martin, The Cook.