Tell Lora I Need Her
I have written on two occasions, "Just a Drop of Oracle APEX" and "APEX and the Affordable Cloud!", about how easy it is to get up and running on hosting providers like Linode and DigitalOcean. The approach largely involves Vagrant, and though it is an easy to use tool, it still needed a little bit of DevOps heroism, and sometimes, dealing with API keys may not necessarily be a priority for someone looking for a quick way to setup a consistent and robust Oracle Application Express environment.
Linode has a cool feature called StackScriptsTM. It allows their customers to quickly choose and deploy a sever based on templates that auto-magically installs and configures the application stacks that required. DigitalOcean calls these "One-click apps", but unfortunately, I have yet to find one that installs the platform that I love, and neither is there a way for me to create a custom one-click app to do so. While Linode provides official templates, customers are free to create and share StackScriptsTM, and that's what I did!
Lora means Linode Oracle Database, REST and APEX stack. It was created so that anyone, beginners and experts alike, can quickly stand up (in approximately 30-60 minutes), a consistent APEX environment. Sign up for an account, read the guide and then deploy Lora today! With a few more tweaks/scripts that I hope to publish in the near future, you can also snap on a valid SSL/TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt, harden SSH access and even add support for R!
Meanwhile, tell Lora that you love her. And tell Lora how much you need her!