10 posts tagged with "infrastructure"

Too good to be true? No, it's true!!!

After hearing the rumours for a few years now, Mr Larry Ellison finally announced the availablility of a Free Tier for the Oracle Cloud. The gift bundle includes two small compute instances and two Autonomous Databases. These offerings are a tiny fraction of what the Oracle Cloud provides, but are sufficient for Oracle Developers to maintain their own 24x7 development environments and possibly even production applications for small businesses and non-profit organisations.

Like everyone else in the Oracle Application Express (APEX) community, I wasted no time in getting my account provisioned and am currently working towards moving workspaces and applications from my old personal APEX instance, hosted on Linode.

With only three days remaining for my 30-day trial, I will finally close these series by discussing my experiences dealing with various levels of support from Oracle. Having used the Oracle Cloud (OCI) both in my day job and as a technology evangelist, I have had the opportunity to engage Oracle support at various levels: sales, customer and technical.

Oracle Function was announced late last year (2018), with limited availability to select Oracle Cloud customers. The platform is built on Fn and is Oracle's solution for developers wanting to deploy services using a Serverless Framework.

As succinctly explained by Kaslin Fields, a Fn function is a small embodiment of code that listens and speaks to HTTP streams. Ideally, each Fn function serves one, and only one purpose. It can be implemented in wide variety of programming languages and they are listed here (see the list of runtime options available).

In case you missed it (which is almost impossible), the Oracle Autonomous Database (AutonomousDB) is Oracle's hottest offering on the Oracle Cloud and it now comes fitted with what is arguably the best feature of the Oracle Database: Oracle Application Express (APEX). I have a few more days to go with this trial, so why not take one out for a spin?

To everyone following my 30 Days on the Oracle Cloud experience, I apologise that I was not able to keep up with the series previously, due to work commitments. I have enrolled in yet another trial, so I am hoping to continue where I left off and share my thirty day adventure with an Oracle Cloud trial. I'm on Day 14 now, and for this post, I'll examine an important issue that many of us face, even in our personal life - moving houses!

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.