One of my fondest memories of my previous job was working with VMware virtualization products. With VMware Workstation, system administrators had the ability to "move" a virtual machine (VM) from a local workstation to vSphere. It was no surprise then that I was very exited (and itching to play) when VirtualBox 6.0 was released with a new feature: support for exporting a VM to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)!
It took a little longer than I had hoped to publish the next article in this series about my experience with a 30-day Oracle Cloud trial. I had a created compute instance in the same compartment and that messed up my estimates. That's just one piece of the puzzle.
After running my Oracle Application Express (APEX) instance (see the previous article on what it takes) for more than a day, I think I have enough to take a first measure of costs and fact check the prices listed by Oracle!
Remember this ad?
IBM BladeCenters were revolutionary at its time. System Administrators would know that one of the largest expense when building out a server infrastructure is real estate costs. Shrinking racks of servers and consolidating into blade servers meant you could put more hardware in less space. However, they were expensive and had their fair share of skeptics. Adopting a proprietary backbone simply meant you were investing into a brand and hence subject to vendor lock-in.
Then came virtualization. With more powerful CPUs, cheaper RAMs and more cost-effective storage solutions, we are now able to cramp more servers into a single server. Other pieces of traditional server infrastructure, e.g. network and storage, could be "software-defined". The server footprint very much "vanished into thin air"!
I have read many comments on social media and blogs about various experiences using the Oracle Cloud for hosting web applications and databases. There are probably more bad than good accounts, and so I wanted to experience the process myself using a trial subscription.
Typically, a trial account only gets you a US$300 credit to use on the Oracle Cloud. The credits are good 30 days, after that, either your upgrade to a paid plan, or you lose everything. You are also required to provide a valid credit card for verification purposes only. According to the sign up page, users are only billed after choosing to "upgrade" the account.
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.
ICYMI (in case you missed it), a team from Oracle has been hard at work these few months churning out a bunch of Vagrant configuration files and scripts that help you provision some really cool virtual machines (VM), powered by Oracle Enterprise Linux. At the time of writing, here are some of the cool VMs you can build:
In a previous article, I had demonstrated how one could use Vagrant to deploy an OXAR virtual machine directly to Linode.
With Digital Ocean (DO) lowering their prices to match Linode's, I thought it would help the community if I created a similar set of instructions to deploy OXAR on DO. I took this a step further and have provided a branch on the Github repository with a modified Vagrantfile.
Running a production application on an Oracle APEX instance? Then read on!
Making sure your application is up and running 24/7 doesn't need to be a daunting task, plus it may not even cost you a dime! UptimeRobot provides 50 free monitors that can poll your servers using the smallest interval of 5 minutes. You can easily monitor websites and receive multi-channel notifications of downtime. No excuse!
Before I begin, I just wanted to be absolutely clear that this post has nothing to do with Apple's nifty tool for sending out large email attachments.
In my previous post, I shared an approach for creating your very own Oracle Application Express (APEX) instance on a small budget. Briefly, the solution involves using Vagrant to create a very affordable virtual machine (VM) on Linode's pool of servers and run the OXAR build script, to setup the APEX instance very quickly and painlessly.
However, all that power (and savings) comes with great responsibilty.
Love Oracle Application Express (APEX), but having trouble finding a decent, affordable home for your killer application? Here's one option you can consider that should not burn your wallet.
Here's a little weekend activity for those of you planning to attend our second ORCLAPEX-YVR meetup on June 17, 2015. To avoid network congestion during the event, please perform the following preparatory steps: