Creating OCI SHA-256 Keys (SSH/API access)

By | April 17, 2019

Having delivered a few OCI workshops, I noticed that a lot of people struggle creating the correct SHA-256 key pairs. If you want to connect to a linux console using SSH, you need to specify SSH keys. If you want to use the OCI APIs, CLI or my OCI iPhone APP you need a different… Read More »

OCI Community is growing!

By | March 19, 2019

As more and more people are starting to seriously use the Oracle Cloud, the community of technical specialists is also growing nicely and sharing their experiences, tools and ideas with the wider community. So I thought it would be good to start a list of “OCI Blogger/websites”, OCI related YouTube channels and 3rd party tools… Read More »

Major new OCI features!

By | March 3, 2019

Wow!! It must have been a busy week for the OCI developers. The last week of February was full of new feature updates to the OCI platform. Let’s have a look at some of this goodness 🙂 Performance Metrics On your Instances (VMs and baremetal) you now have full performance metrics available in the cloud… Read More »

Importing / Moving on-premise (VMware) instances to OCI

By | February 22, 2019

OCI’s Native VMDK Import feature It is of course important that you can easily move any of your on-premise workloads to the Cloud. The Oracle Cloud has specific features to help you with this task, like the native support for importing .VMDK files. A good starting point in the documentation is here: https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/Compute/References/bringyourownimage.htm If you… Read More »

Consumption Insight with the API

By | February 1, 2019

If you start using the Oracle Cloud (OCI), you want to of course have a good understanding about your spending. The Oracle Cloud provides you with some special tools to manage your consumption. One of them being cost-tracking tags. On each object / service in the Oracle Cloud you can apply cost-tracking tags, these tags… Read More »

Grow / Shrink Compute Instances

By | January 15, 2019

A very common question I come across a lot is “how to change the size of the Compute Instance (VM)“. Currently this is not “natively” possible, but with some manual labor very doable!. Happily OCI does support terminating an Instance while keeping the boot and data volumes. If you instance works with a reserved Public… Read More »

Auto Start / Stop Compute Instances

By | January 3, 2019

I have extended the library of scripts for automatic scheduling. There was already a script to auto Scale BM Database and ATP/ADW instances. New is the autoOnOff script for compute instances. Based on a pre-defined tag in the namespace “Schedule” you can now automatically power on or off compute instances. This will not delete any… Read More »

OCI Manager v1.4 Available – Console View

By | December 10, 2018

The OCI Manager iPhone App is still going strong 🙂 Over 300 people have installed the App and the 5th release v1.4 is now available.  The Last 2 released have added the following features: View the Console of Compute Instances Added support for sub compartment bug fixes You can find the App in the Apple… Read More »

Where and Who Am I? OCI Instance Metadata Service

By | December 9, 2018

When you are running your instances on OCI, you sometimes would like to know inside the instance where it really it. Well this is possible by using OCI Metadata service.  The Metadata service listen on 169.254.169.254 and will report back information about the Instance, like OCID, Displayname, Shape, Region, etc. Including any custom Metadata that… Read More »

Easy view Audit Log events in the OCI App v1.2

By | November 8, 2018

Knowing what is going on in your OCI environment can be a daunting task. The OCI Audit service logs everything, and I mean really everything. Most of these log entries are just queries for information, so it can be a challenge finding and understand these Audit Events. In the new release of the iPhone OCI… Read More »

Oracle Open World 2018 Highlight

By | October 26, 2018

This was the week of Oracle Open World. A huge Oracle customer and partner gathering in San Francisco, with of course many new announcements. There were 2 Larry keynotes, one focusing on OCI and the other on the Oracle Applications business. Larry made it very clear that OCI (The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) is a NEW… Read More »

NEW OCI Features: Cost tracking based on Tags and Instance Pools

By | October 21, 2018

Cost-Tracking Tags Managing your consumption cost is of course important in any Cloud situation. To make it easier to understand what project is consuming what, OCI now support Cost-Tracking Tags. You can create (currently) up to 10 different cost-tracking tags. For each resource like Compute, Storage, Database and Networking you can assign these Tags with… Read More »

iPhone App for managing Oracle Ravello

By | October 21, 2018

Amazingly enough, I am not the only one developing IOS apps for the Oracle Cloud. Alex Barbaneagra, an Oracle senior sales consultant in Romania, has developed an iPhone App to manage your Oracle Ravello. Within the App you can see your blueprints and applications. Inside the applications you can see all your Virtual Machines and… Read More »

iPhone App for managing OCI – AVAILABLE

By | October 14, 2018

Well it took a few late nights of nerding, but I finished version 1 of my OCI Management App for the iPhone 🙂 Below you can see a preview video. The App is now available in the Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oci-manager/id1439011461 If you need help configuring the App, here are the instructions: https://www.oc-blog.com/iphone/ The app… Read More »

OCI – Creating a VPN to pfsense appliance

By | September 29, 2018

If you want to connect your cloud environment securely with your on premise environment you can do this with the built in VPN service of OCI. I have in my own (on premise) environment a pfsense virtual appliance running that acts as my router/firewall/vpn box. Below a video explanation and demonstration on how to easily create… Read More »

Automatic (Scheduled) Scaling for ADW and ATP

By | September 15, 2018

Last week I released a script that allows you to schedule the scaling of an Oracle Database running on the baremetal cloud instances. That script was designed to run inside the actual Database instance. The new Oracle Autonomous services do not allow you to do this, as these are fully managed platforms by Oracle, so… Read More »

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Exam (1Z0-932)

By | September 14, 2018

Whoop whoop! I just passed the OCI Associate Exam. While I have reasonable hands-on experience with OCI, for preparation  I read the study guide and did the test exam. You can find the preparation documents here: https://education.oracle.com/product/pexam_1Z0-932  I guess I had 57 correct and 13 not correct 🙁 . Currently the study guide mainly covers… Read More »