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!
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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.
Here's my first contribution to the annual ODC Appreciation Day that was initiated by Tim Hall three years ago.
The product feature that I'd like to pay special tribute to this year is Oracle Multimedia (OMM). By now, I believe most would have heard that OMM has been deprecated. Mike Dietrich made special mention of it in a blog post earlier this year, with some clarity as to exactly when we can expect to see this useful feature go away for good.
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:
Want to get started on APEX development but don't want to muck around with Linux too much, then this guide's for you! As a follow-up to our second ORCLAPEX-YVR meetup on June 17, 2015, and to supplement Trent Schafer's excellent post on how you could build an Oracle APEX instance, here's a simple procedure that you can use to stand up your personal APEX development environment in probably much less than 30 minutes depending on your Internet connection bandwidth!