Recent Posts by Stefan Hinker

Instance Pools (especially in combination with rules for automatic scaling) are a great feature of OCI to automate the scaling of compute resources to match fluctuating demand. Examples can be seasonal or weekly peaks or a compute pool in a DR scenario. Instance Pools are quickly configured in the OCI console, although you can of course also manage them with the OCI CLI, terraform or other supported methods for Infrastructure as Code. One aspect of instance pools that will...

Migrations are a necessary evil. But if they can't be avoided, one should at least take advantage of the opportunity and piggyback some modernization onto the move. This short article tells the story of such a migration. Here's the setting: The workload to migrate consisted of several dozen instances of Weblogic, each with their own database for application and data. The databases were hosted on a few container databases, enclosed in one PDB for each instance of Weblogic....

With the OS Management Service (OSMS), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides a service to fully automate the patching of your Oracle Linux or Windows instances. It allows you to organize your systems into groups and then schedule jobs to apply the latest updates to all these systems. There is a wide range of predefined software sources to choose from, providing the full wealth of the Oracle yum repositories to your Linux systems. In the simplest case, this will keep all your...

Sometimes all you want to do is create regular backups of your instances. Policy-Based Backups to the rescue. All you need to do is choose from one of the existing policies or define your own and then apply that to the instance or volume you want to protect. This works like a charm and opens the door to cross-region copies and very simple restore operations. However, what do you do if you have multiple data volumes attached to your instance, in addition to the boot volume...

In a previous blog post, I introduced the Oracle Cloud Metering API. The logical next step is to wrap some Python functions around the API calls and use them to get meaningful reports for a tenancy. This is what I’ll discuss here for a sample use case. For the sake of this example, let’s assume we’re interested in cost by compartment. This could easily be modified to use any other type of cost tracking tags. But since compartments are already prepopulated and all OCI resources...

Anything the OCI Console displays is the result of REST calls to one of the various APIs through which all OCI services are available. After all, the Console is just as much a client to these APIs as the OCI CLI, the Python SDK or the Terraform provider. However, there is one area where the Console provides data not available via any of these other API clients: Cost Analysis. In fact, looking over the list of the OCI APIs , none seem to address this topic. The Budgets API (see...

In my previous post, I described how to setup a highly available GusterFS server environment using terraform. I briefly mentioned the provisions I had taken to ensure high performance as well, but didn't go into details of performance validation. This is what I'll do here. To recap, the expected maximum performance from the three Gluster servers was: 3 GB/sec write throughput 9 GB/sec read throughput To measure this performance, we need a sufficient number of Gluster clients and...

GlusterFS is a well known, scalable, high performance shared filesystem. It is easy to install either on premises or in the cloud. Guides for this can be found in many places, including here and here. However, after you built your second or third Gluster environment, you start thinking of automation, especially when you are in the cloud. Automation not only provides a quick way of creating a new environment when you need it. It also delivers reproducible and thus reliable...

I've been with Sun and Oracle for a long time.  In fact, just a few months ago I was invited to a 20 year anniversary celebration - just a few days before my 21st year was complete ;-)  So, it's been a while, and over the years, the primary tool for working has, of course, been a keyboard attached to some sort of data processing and display unit.  And, not surprisingly, this device adapted to change just as I did, all the various job role changes included.  For those...