The 2016 Leap Second in the Cloud: It’s spread out for Oracle DBs on RDS

The 27th leap second will be officially applied December 31, 2016 at 23:59:60 UTC. For Oracle DB instances on RDS the following applies:

  • RDS will spread out the leap second equally in the 24h surrounding the timestamp above.
  • After this period RDS time will be in sync with  Cordinated Universal Time.
  • This applies for Oracle DB instances with versions 11.2.0.2, 11.2.0.3, and 12.1.0.1. They will follow AWS Adjusted Time that is applied to RDS.

Oracle Database on Docker Official Now!

Those of you using Docker will know that we had a Docker file provided by Oracle for creating an Oracle database image since quite a while. However, the Oracle database was so far not certified to run on Docker. This has changed now!

Oracle database on on a Docker container is now officially certified, you can refer to the MOS Doc ID 2216342.1. Don’t worry if you cannot access the link. So far it only states some very basic facts. Also those who know me will understand that I generally dislike postings referring to closed content such as my Oracle support – please regard this as an add-on if you have access to MOS.

How it works

  • There won’t be simple way to just issue a docker run command to get an Oracle DB running since there is no publicly available Docker image for Oracle database due to legal reasons.
  • You have to build your own Docker image from based on a directory that you can check out from github.

Oracle DB on Docker – What is supported

  • A single instance Oracle DB, either Oracle Database – Enterprise Edition – Version 12.1.0.2+ or Oracle Database – Standard Edition – Version 12.1.0.2+
  • Docker containers running on Oracle Linux and Red Hat RHEL  x86-64

Oracle DB on Docker – What is not supported

  • Oracle RAC
  • Although not stated in the support notes there is probably more that is not supported, i.e. everything that is not explicitly listed (how about Golden Gate etc.?)

 

SOA Expert Series: OSB Domain / SOA Suite Cloud Service a Technical Correction

SOA Expert Series: OSB Workmanagers and Thread Constraints

We had a webcast by the Oracle A-Team about OSB workmanager and thread constraints recently, with very good overall feedback!

 

What I liked most was that many questions were answered. You can get the full list here. Everything very valuable and I recommend to read it after looking at the slides.

OSB Domains and Clusters

Let me point out one unfortunate mistake to a rather interesting question: “How do you handle 1000 services in an OSB cluster?”. The answer was to create several OSB clusters in one domain.

With all the respect, yet I believe the answer is not correct. It is not allowed / not possible to have more than one OSB cluster in domain. This is confirmed by the Oracle documentation:

Actually the question IMHO implies much more, e.g. how to deal with a large number of services with different resource requirements, payload sizes, etc.

 

 

 

Oracle Container Cloud Service (OCCS)

Docker has undergone a dramatic evolution in only the last couple of years. From virtually unknown in 2014, it still seemed to be a exotic, niche open source solution when WebLogic was certified on Docker in early 2015.

Nowadays this is different. End of 2016 it has become very common to explore new software by just running an official Docker image from Docker hub. CI / CD pipelines are often built on Docker for repeatability. Docker is one of the key building blocks for runtime environments of those wandering down the microservices alley.

However, you need much more than just a starting a Docker container or two. You need infrastructure, networking, private and public registries, containers have to be scaled and restarted if they fail. All this needs to be installed, configured, and operated. On premises this is not an easy task.

There is a huge difference between spinning up a Docker container and operating a Kubernetes cluster for enterprise critical applications 24/7 in production. So the the obvious choice is often the cloud with a PaaS based container cloud service.

Oracle Container Cloud Service (OCCS) is the newest addition in the Oracle Cloud portfolio. It was built to solve the issues discussed in this posting. The following webcast helps you to understand the key components of OCCS. If you follow it, you can have a worldwide monitoring of your own domain running in some 5 minutes on a hosted Docker container.

Those who know my WebLogic Distinctive Recipes book understand that I am not a big fan of those click here, screenshot, then click there, screenshot articles – therefore I created the webcast for you with a working example that is not already in OCCS. Make sure to read the OCCS documentation anyway.

 

Let me know if you like it!

 

Tips and Tricks for Oracle Container Cloud Service (OCCS)

Some days ago I posted a longer getting started with OCCS webcast which should serve as a good introduction if you are new to OCCS. Also I posted about using OCCS with Grafana on Docker for network latency measurements.

In this article I will provide a number of tips and tricks I discovered while exploring  OCCS.

Keep in mind that OCCS is the newest addition in the Oracle Cloud portfolio. Everything I tried was stable so far. Note that this article – like all my other articles actually – reflect my opinion . Maybe some of the items below will help you to get your containers running easier!

This list is not complete yet and I will extend it as I discover new things around OCCS. Drop me a comment below if there is anything you want to be added here. I am curious about your own experiences.

OCCS Tips and Tricks

  • Do you have trouble logging into Oracle Cloud? I recommend to have a look at my other posting and check here.
  • The provisioning of the service (i.e. the underlying machine) seems to depend on the instance size. Small instances are provisioned in the range of several minutes. However in the Europe 2 data center I waited between 2h and 3h until the service was provisioned on a OC3 instance. Let me know if your experience is different e.g. the provisioning is faster in the US.
  • Starting up a container is much quicker than provisioning the underlying service.
  • The container console itself is surprisingly well hidden. It had to look into the tutorial to find it :-(. You can find it here:
  • If you want to start an OCCS container with a docker image that is started with a -d flag from the command-line, don’t worry. OCCS runs all containers as daemons, so you don’t have to provide this flag.
  • If something went wrong and you look for log output of your container, then check under
    Container / Name / View Logs.
  • Sometimes you will experience that containers are “flapping”. This means they are started but run into an error. Then they are started again, etc. Check the logs to find out what is happening and stop the container.– this posting will be continued once I discover more tips and tricks for OCCS.
  • If you run the classic example
    docker run hello-world

    the container will be restarted once it is finished, so technically it will be flapping. It is quite likely that OCCS will support a flag in the future to run special containers only once. Note that this is not the typical enterprise use case anyway but more more a first step of what devops try on the command-line.

  • You can use SSH to connect to the OCCS manager nodes, however you cannot connect to the worker nodes as of now. The manager node is running a very restricted VM environment with some essential tools like vi, cat, rm, cp etc. only. To connect to the master node use the private key that was generated when you set up the service and the following syntax:
    ssh -i privateKey opc@PUBLIC_IP
  • It would obviously be interesting if OCCS would offer services out of the box for the Oracle supported Docker images from https://github.com/oracle/docker-images.
  • The Container Console is using a self signed root certificate and therefore creating a browser warning. This is nothing severe but Oracle should document a way to install your own X.509 certs to avoid the warning.
  • From 10,000 feet OCCS might look vaguely similar to Kubernetes, but OCCS is not based on Kubernetes. Actually Kubernetes is more complex to set up and to operate. OCCS’ goal is “to provide an easy and powerful way for enterprises to run their containers on our service”.

At the end, your goal should be to be able to run your own Docker image on OCCS. Give it a try!

Functional Checklist: OSB 12c / SOA Cloud Service (SOA CS) Upgrade

When upgrading to from OSB 11g to OSB 12c or to its cloud cousin SOA CS there are new features that you should be aware of. I will go through the most important ones in this posting. Additionally I will present some architectural / operational facts that you should know. Obviously you don’t have to adopt every new feature. Mostly OSB 11g projects will continue to work after they are loaded as a config jar into 12c. So using new features of 12c can be a gradual process.

The following non exhaustive list was compiled to support the upgrading of a dozen of several large scale projects with almost 200 services on OSB and a team of 12 developers. It assumes that you have a basic understanding of OSB 11g.

 

Installation / Domains

  • Choose the SOA Suite 12c quickinstaller for for first exporations. Quickinstaller comes with WebLogic, OSB, SOA Suite, and JDeveloper. All matching version numbers. Also the internal domain is created and started automatically and it runs the the Java DB.
  • Compared to 11g the creation of a dev environment has become easier, but the installation of a prod domain more difficult (due to hard dependencies on a database)
  • Even though quickinstalls are easy, consider the use of virtual instances, Docker or at least a scripted installations for dev environments. Even for mediums sized team developer team you will have to fix issues more often than you might believe if developers follow a written instruction. Always. Script. Automate. Or put it in a (virtual) box.
  • Understand the creation of standalone domains. It saves you the time and resources for deploying unnecessary SOA Suite artifacts when only an OSB domain is required.
  • For production domains you need a supported Oracle
    DB (mainly for MDS, but also for OWSM etc).
  • Therefore for production installations you have to run the RCU utility to generate the required schema.
  • You cannot load 11g Eclipse projects into JDeveloper 12c directly.
  • Expect that you can import most of your OSB 11g artifacts as an sbconfig.jar into JDev and they will continue to run. There might be exceptions, so test a representative number of your typical communication patterns / transport protocols and XQuery / XSLT transformations for an estimate.

IDE / JDeveloper

  • JDeveloper is the only IDE you can use with OSB 12c. Support for Eclipse does not exist anymore
  • We found JDeveloper 12c (12.2.1.1) on Linux rather unstable and observed several crashes. The dev team will use more Windows 7 based installations now and I will update this item later

Maven

  • Make sure to understand maven support. It was broken in 12.2.1 and required manual fixes in several pom files.
  • Officially maven is still not fixed in 12.2.1.2 but it works if you configure the maven.oracle.com repository and also use the push plugin to create local artifacts in .m2.
  • Note that just pushing the 12.2.1.2 ORACLE_HOME into .m2 with the maven plugin from OSB is not enough and you will encounter missing files.
  • Don’t forget to update the catalogue of maven artifacts after using the OSB maven plugin.

Actions / Pipelines

  • Pipelines are not part of the proxy service anymore, but standalone now.
  • Separated pipelines enable reuse.
  • Pipelines can use shared variables.
  • You can enable/disable stages and actions but not pipeline pairs.
  • You can use domain value maps (DVM)
  • You can also use cross references (XRef)
  • There are pipeline templates. I find them useful to standardize service development and especially error handling.
  • Make sure to understand about the new resequencer to order messages in OSB
  • If you import an OSB 11g jar the existing proxies will be automatically converted and the pipelines will be extracted and shown as separated items.
  • OSB 12c actions are mostly the same. Understand if you can make good use of the following new features / actions
    • dynamic validation
    • disabling actions
  • The new nXSD replaces the MFT for native data formats

Caching / Coherence

  • Make sure to understand OBS caching per service implemented. This can be a huge performance boost and a rather large number of project teams I am talking to don’t even consider to use it.
  • If OSB caching for the results of business services is used, configure it properly (off instance coherence cache).

XQuery

  •  OSB 12c supports XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 specifications
  • XQuery libraries are supported also graphically by JDeveloper

New Consoles / Fusion Middleware Control

  • The new /sbconsole is now available under /servicebus
  • Oracle Fusion Middleware Control is the new console for monitoring etc. It is available under /em.
  • You can now dynamically update Domain-Value Maps (DMV) in OFMCtrl

Upgrade Process

  • Oracle publishes a lengthy upgrade flow diagram describing the upgrade process. Familiarize yourself with it.
  • I usually recommend not to upgrade existing 11g domains with the reconfiguration wizzard but to start with a new 12c domain and then reimport your artifacts, and recreate configuration with your automation scripts (e.g. WLST).

Cloud

  • Consider using the SOA Cloud Service for the benefits of an cloud instance (almost zero setup, metered licensing, automatic patching etc).
  • You can have a free SOA CS trial for 30 days. This give you time to explore if it flexible, fast and reliable enough for your needs.
  • All functional features described above apply to OSB on premises as well as SOA CS.

 

 

Overambitious API Gateways

Did you know? Thoughtworks put “overambitious” API gateways on HOLD in their tech radar. What does it mean? Should we all stop using API gateways? Was it a trend that is over now?

Remember ESBs?

Actually, no, not at all. I had a discussion with a Thoughtworker and he explained “It’s a bit like the situation we had with ESBs. They were just too heavy, blown out of proportion, and often used in the wrong places”. I guess most of us working in the SOA space will agree. Some of us have seen ESBs doing file transfer, master data replication and event streaming (sometimes even at the same time).

Proper API Gateways

Let’s put it the other way around. Use an API Gateway if you require a stable API as a frontend to your clients with a high-throughput entry point to a possibly serverless / FaaS architecture (let me assume you are trendy). Let’s not forget traffic management, version management of APIs, and monitoring.

Actually – if you look closely – an API Gateway product is even on the tech radar under platforms and rated as “access”.

Anyway, I must admit that I like the term. Overambitious API Gateway. I actually consider getting some crisps and a beer, lean back and wait to see overambitious microservices, overambitious FaaS, and certainly overambitious DevOps popping up. And of course no need to mention overambitious IOT, now that Mark made it into the Guardian with his Kettle.

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Feedback: Big Data Training: Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, Oracle and the Cloud

Guys, thanks for attending my DOAG training day about Cloudera/Hadoop and Oracle Big data. I am pleased about your amazing feedback!

Statistics about Big Data Training Day

About the course

Attendees had the following opinion about the course when asked right after the training

  • 100% of those who answered would recommend the course
  • 100% of all found it interesting
  • 81% found that content matched their experience
  • 86% were happy or very happy with the course (these are the 2 highest grades possible)
  • 0% were unhappy
  • Everyone  except one person (that is 20 people) found the level of difficulty okay.
  • Everyone except one person found that they were engaged enough

About myself

The following is what attendees mentioned as feedback about myself (there were no explicit questions about Edelweiss, so she is not included unfortunately). Multiple answers were possible, answers weren’t mandatory. This basically tells that someone making a cross at e.g. informative sincerely means it.

  • 86% found me interesting
  • 40% entertaining 🙂
  • 90% informative
  • 71% demonstrative and clear

OSB / SOA Suite 12c Domain Types

OSB / SOA Suite 12c Domain Types

screen-shot-2016-11-30-at-16-22-10Let me explain you some news about the domain types in 12c, since some of my colleagues were fiddling around with this. Due to the new quickstart installer for SOA Suite and OSB 12c there are more domain types available now for SOA Suite and OSB12c that you need to understand. The following options describe those types with added comments of when the make sense.

 

 

Options:

  1. The integrated domain that gets generated by JDeveloper if you run a project. Sometimes it is called default domain. This domain is bound to JDeveloper. Whenever you quit JDev, the domain shuts down. The downside is that this domain always supports OSB and SOA Suite, so a bit of waste of resources if you are only after OSB . This is the easiest solution for your first steps because no manual domain creation is required and JDev does it all for you.
  2. A standalone domain. This is the new and interesting option, because a standalone domain uses the Java DB and does not require you to run the RCU utility. Still a standalone domain is running independent from JDeveloper 12c, so you could you use this type of domain for development with OSB web console.You create the domain by setting the QS_TEMPLATES environment variable and running qs_config.sh, then create an application server connection with JDev, use the standalone server option in the application server connection wizzard, and point it to the standalone domain.
    You will be able to use “Deploy” from JDeveloper, but unfortunately not “Run as”.
    There are more benefits to a standalone domain not mentioned in the official documentation: Whereas the integrated domain includes everything needed for SOA suite you can restrict a standalone domain to Service Bus only and therefore reduce the number of internal deployments from 304 to 278 which will save you startup time.
  3. A compact domain can be used with quickstart. Also compact domains are targeted for development. This domain will be compatible with add-ons such at MFT, OES, etc. Note that you have to specify a special parameter CONFIG_JVM_ARGS=-Dcom.oracle.cie.config.showProfile for this option to be visible in the configuration wizzard.
    Since you can use it with an compatible Oracle DB, the necessary schemas have to be created with the RCU utility. Note: A compact domain is a developer domain consisting of a single admin server and no managed servers.
    The opposite of a compact domain is called extended domain where resources are deployed on a cluster of managed servers. Use extended domain for environments such as test, integration, load test, prod. These environments are distributed and clustered typically due to HA requirements.

Conclusion

It is important to understand the various domain types and to choose the correct domain type for your requirements. You can strip down a standalone domain to be OSB only, then make sure to select Integrated Servers if you want to deploy directly from JDev to it.

It’s a wrap: Oracle and Cloudera Big Data Training – On Premise and Cloud

Wow – We have done it! Weeks of preparation, reading, trying out tools, and hacking went into the preparation of this training course. Even during the OTN APAC tour I took some days off and worked from my Bangkok home office to prepare for the DOAG trainings day.

At the end it was totally worth it. I had 21 top notch DBAs and developers on the attendee list, also some 10 students attended. DOAG is running a good student program. For helping out a little bit students are allowed to attend sessions and the DOAG training day. Quite often I get a lot of them. 2 years ago I was running a full day multi-cloud training and every single student including their professor decided to attend my session – although they had the choice amongst 6 different trainings. Anyway, nice to be popular with the young people. Next time I will come in sneakers and wear that Cloudera T-Shirt. Also it became a bit of a challenge for Oracle to attract students. So I am glad to help 🙂

Fabulous news was that Edelweiss took over the Oracle part, so I was lucky to talk about what I love – the open source and Cloudera part.

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Edelweiss did her session via Skype. I was a bit sceptical and expecting technical problems because of the network latency but it went swimmingly. The conference room had good speakers, so I could play some music in the break and Edelweiss almost seemed to be present in the room but kind of invisible.

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Well now you know it. This is what is cool.

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A really great surprise was that everyone enjoyed the idea of working with VirtualBox and accepted labs that I prepared. Most people took them home to further play with the Big Data Lite instance.

At the end we covered a whole lot of content in a long day:

From Open Source / Cloudera Stack 

From Oracle Big Data Products

Oracle Big Data ApplianceOBIEEOracle Data Integrator (ODI)Oracle Big Data Discovery

Training Day: Cloudera Hadoop Stack with Kafka and Cassandra and Oracle Big Data / BI and the Cloud

Right after the DOAG conference 2016 in Nürnberg / Germany we will be running a big data training day. Meet the big 4: Hadoop, Spark, Kafka (all 3 from the Cloudera distribution), and Cassandra. Plus Oracle Big Data on top. For details in German see here.

Topics of the workshop are the following (subject to change):
Open Source / Cloudera Stack 

Oracle Big Data Products

Oracle Big Data Appliance

OBIEE

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)

Oracle Big Data Discovery

 

The training day will include live demos and some are running in the cloud. So stay tuned!

This event will be co-hosted by Edelweiss Kammermann, Oracle ACE director from Uruguay and BI expert. Edelweiss will present mostly about Oracle Big Data / Business Intelligence, whereas I will try to cover the open source Hadoop / Cloudera part.

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OTN Tour APAC Australia Sydney / Gold Coast: From on Premise to JCS and OCCS

The part of the OTN Tour 2016 in Australia was a personal highlight for me. This is where I wrote the biggest part of my cloud computing book and started a small subsidiary for my company.

Both OTN events weren’t massive but very well organized. Interested audience, lots of feedback and questions. Thanks to everybody who attended. I presented about WebLogic with Java Cloud Service (JCS) and Docker with the new Oracle Container Cloud Service (OCCS). Slides are available as usual on slideshare.

Here is a compilation of the event. Enjoy the video!

When flying back from Gold Coast I had the most amazing view ever on Sydney Harbour, the Opera House etc. A video you should not miss out!

Sangam Conference 2016 India / Bangalore

I attended the Sangam conference in Bangalore this year after the OTNTour in APAC. Instead of a longer trip report I decided to compile a small video that will give you an impression about the excellent event.

Enjoy the video. If your network connection allows it, set the video to HD and full screen. If your neighbours allow it, turn up the volume!
My slides of my Docker talk and the WebLogic Server 12c presentation are online.

OTN APAC Tour 2016 Auckland: WLS / JCS, Docker / OCCS and OSB / SOA Suite CS

Second day of the OTN APAC Tour 2016 in Auckland.  Changed my introduction from the Eisbach surfers a bit to another German stereotype 🙂

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I did another 3 presentations. Again I spoke about What You Should Know about WebLogic,
Oracle Service Bus and Docker. Not surprisingly the Docker presentation and live demo was very well received and people asked all kind of questions afterwards. We had some good discussions about the usage of Oracle JCS and the upcoming Docker in the cloud (OCCS).

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Also I uploaded a number of photos of day 2 of the OTN APAC tour:

OTN APAC Tour 2016 Wellington: WLS / JCS, Docker / OCCS and OSB / SOA Suite CS

New Zealand Oracle OTN / NZOUG

The OTN APAC Tour 2016 started Oct 26th in Wellington. I bumped into Tim Hall already at the airport and then met other colleagues such as Bjoern Rost and Anton Els at the conference. The conference was hosted at the Amora hotel with a number of about 100 attendees.

I did 3 presentations, which was quite challenging after 30h of travel time the previous day. The same night we left for Auckland where another 3 presentations are scheduled. Anyway, good news was that Francisco Munoz picked us up at the airport at night and gave us a ride to the hotel.

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A distributed system is the one that prevents you from working because of the failure of a machine that you had never heard of

This quote is part of my tech quote explained series from Java One / Open World 2016. Actually it is the special edition for the OTN appreciation day 🙂

Leslie’s Quote that I heard at Java One 2016:

“A distributed system is one that prevents you from working
because of the failure of a machine that you had never heard of.”

Leslie Lamport

Explanation:

The following explanation is mine, not Leslie Lamport’s. Besides, yes, Leslie is the guy who is known for LaTex and his work on the Paxos algorithm.

There are many rather theoretical publications about distributed systems, but Leslie’s definition nails it. Distributed systems produce all kind of surprises! They are never boring. Latency issues or network failures may trigger timeouts or split brain conditions. System failures, availability zone outages or the complete failure of a data center region challenge your availability concept. If everything goes terribly, terribly wrong, you better have a good contingency plan within close reach.

Nowadays we offload some of these challenges to modern cloud architectures. On a PaaS or SaaS level you simply stop worrying about it, because somebody else solves the problem for you. On a IaaS level things are obviously more interesting. The popular circuit breaker pattern – the one that is now mentioned in seemingly every blog or presentation (I also wrote about it in my cloud book ) – goes back to the Netflix Cloud OSS and the research done in over 50 open source projects.

Antifragility means that you grow by doing the things that stress you. Like you when you grow your biceps when going to the gym. Modern cloud architectures run an armada of chaos monkeys, chaos gorillas and latency monkey that simulate system or data center failures in production environments and inject random latencies in networks. Due to this developers are challenged to write resilient code and architects architect for constant failure. The kind of failures Leslie mentioned in his quote.

Don’t miss the other quotes of this series, e.g. regarding app servers vs. monoliths, and about SaaS and Cloud APIs.

If you don’t have cloud APIs when connecting to SAAS it is not gonna work – Luis Weir / Oracle Open World 2016.

This quote is part of my tech quote explained series from Java One / Open World 2016.

Luis Weir’s Quote from Open World 2016:

“If you don’t have cloud APIs when connecting to SAAS it is not gonna work. Simple as that”.”

Luis Augusto Weir, Principal Cap Gemini UK. @Luisw19

Explanation:

The following explanation is mine, not Luis’:

The number of APIs has grown exponentially over the last years. When a public API was almost exotic, strange and seemingly weird a couple years ago it has become the norm today. Do you still remember when you searched for a working implementation of a web service that you could access with a public WSDL just a while ago?

Nowadays there is a wide array of public APIs available. APIs give you access to Twitter, to Amazon Web Services, to your business partners, your Tesla or BMW car, to your home automation system and so on. No SaaS would make any sense without it.

The world has dramatically changed. Everything comes with an API and will continue to do so. This is why API Management becomes increasingly important and popular to manage such APIs. To understand more about this, including the evolution from REST and API Gateways to APIs everywhere, check out Luis API Management in 2016 presentation.

 

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Don’t miss the first quote of this series regarding app servers vs. monoliths.

Using an app server does not mean you build a monolith – Mark Little / Java One

This quote is part of my tech quote explained series from Java One / Open World 2016.

Mark’s Quote from Java One 2016:

“Using an app server does not mean you build a monolith.”

Mark Little Red Hat. Lead JBoss Technical Direction / Research Develepment. @nmcl

 

 

Explanation:

The following explanation is mine, not Mark’s:

There is a lot of FUD about microservices these days. Some people assume that existing technologies such as application servers will be completely replaced by the new microservices trend. Sometimes application servers seem almost like an anti pattern for microservices, which is of course not true.

The dominant (and IMHO overused) example for a successful microservices architecture is Netflix. Netflix has been using Tomcat for many years as an web application server because they understood the importance of an abstraction for a “container” (obviously not in sense of a OS Linux/Docker container). Their former CTO Adrian Cockraft once explained that the “container” (again not in a Docker sense) you use doesn’t really matter, be it Tomcat, WebLogic or now a days Docker. What matters is that you have a unique abstraction that allows you to run and schedule your artifacts.

Mark has a blog posting talking about container-less development. I spoke about microservices at the OTN Latam Tour (see my trip report and Tim’s posting).

Technology Quotes Series: Java One and Oracle Open World 2016

Yesterday I touched down in Frankfurt and got off the A380 after this year’s Oracle Open World conference. Regarding the event I had quite some expectations and to make it short most of them were fulfilled.

This year the whole event seemed even bigger to me and I spent considerable amount of time commuting from Java One to Oracle Open World and vice versa. There were just too many exciting sessions I attended to list them all here.

Some Background

There is dramatic change in technology happening right now and for those not able to travel to OOW, Java One or of course other conferences it is sometimes hard to follow.

Earlier this year, I designed a sticker. Surprisingly I received a lot questions about it. The kind of questions reminded me that some thoughts that keep me busy to a large percentage of my professional time not related to your daily business. Therefore often new trends, new tech and even new buzzwords are hard to understand.

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The New Technology Quotes Series

Thinking about this inspired me for my new Open World and Java One 2016 quotes series. Instead of repeating the vendor announcements that you can read in other blogs, I decided to dig a little deeper on the presenters’ best quotes.

Why Quotes?

In a series of postings I will quickly explain a quote each. So why quotes? I will talk about quotes, because they capture the essential, they are inspiring, amusing, challenging or simply surprising. They are related to somebody, not just a vendor slogan. It’s tech with emotion. Somebody said it who is passionate of about this tech bit, somebody who cares.

So will be about something that got stuck in my brain. As usual, I will avoid empty marketing phrases and instead focus on honest tech bits.

Every quote will be provided as best effort. Feel free to drop me an email if something is wrong about it.

… so stay tuned!

Win a Oracle WebLogic Server and a Middleware and Cloud Computing Book

 

At this year’s Oracle Open World I will be gifting a total of 4 review copies of my books.  Opposite the official bookstore, right at the OTN Lounge.

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Oracle Book raffle

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Details

To win: retweet the original Twitter announcement. I will pick a random retweet as the winner by Tuesday 13.00h and let you know. I suggest to follow me on Twitter so that I can inform you if you are the lucky winner. The winner can pick up the copy opposite the Oracle book shop at the OTN lounge at the following time only:

  • All books are given away in Moscone South, Tuesday 15.15h, right at the OTN lounge. In case of doubt ask for the OTN manager Bob Rhubart (left on the picture below).
  • There will be free beer at the OTN lounge at that time, so pass by say Hello and join us for a drink and a photo.

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This is not a lottery. No purchase required. The winner is kindly asked to write a short review an Amazon.com.

My Expectations for Open World 2016 Conference

I just arrived last night at SFO for Oracle Open World conference. This morning we will have the Oracle ACE director briefing updating us on Oracle’s upcoming tech under NDA.

Expectations

My personal expectations for this year’s OOW are the following:

  1. major updates on Oracle Cloud
  2. Broader adoption of their Docker strategy (for the current strategy see my OTN Tour Latam 2016 presentation here)
  3. Hopefully cool announcements around microservices
  4. Smaller, but exciting updates on Oracle WebLogic Server, OSB and SOA Suite
  5. Enjoy listening to Sting playing at the appreciation event

Note, this post was written before attending the briefing and before being under NDA for a few days.

 

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OTN Tour Latin America 2016: Colombia

Oracle Technology Network Tour 2016 in Pereira

After 2015 in Cali, the OTN conference in 2016 for Colombia took place in Pereira. Pereira is a city located in an area that is famous for producing Colombia’s best coffee. And it is true, we saw coffee growing everywhere. Our hotel was located in spacious green area – a nice and welcome difference to the big cities I had seen so far on this trip.

The Conference

The conference was as well organized as last year by Giovanna Bohorquez Paez and her team from the Asociación de Usuarios Oracle de Colombia. It took place at the University of Pereira. We had live translation and live streaming to the world, so even my family could see me there presenting, fancy that! Due to the location we had a unique chance to speak to students and explain them about Oracle technology, e.g. why it is so much more than the database. Actually quite a few came straight to me and my colleagues to ask us questions! This is alone was worth the trip.

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Again, I was giving some of the Oracle books away that I authored, and you can tell attendees loved it.

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I spoke about Oracle Service Bus and the FUD about Microservices and I delivered a presentation about What You Should Know About WebLogic 12.2.1.

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The Non-Conference Part

After my first presentation in Pereira, i.e. after a total of 11 presentations and the same number of air conditioned plane rides and hotel stays, my voice totally was devastated. Tea with honey helped a lot, so I could deliver my second presentation the other day.

After the first day we had a great conference dinner! You can tell from the photo that everybody was really satisfied 🙂

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After the conference I spent a couple of days 0n my own expenses to see the Museo del Oro (gold museum) in Bogota and the Botero museum – both are excellent and I highly recommend seeing them.

Gold, gold, gold:

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Impressions from Botero:

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OTN Tour Latin America 2016: Peru

Oracle Technology Tour 2016: Lima

I have been there for the second time now, and Lima is always a good to me. I like the city, its food, its people, and the great places to go. This year I was staying closer to the sea and the popular Larcomar.

The Conference

The OTN Lima 2016 conference was in a more central hotel and offered a number of great auditoriums. I gave 2 books away based on the number guessing game that I learned from Heli. Before I gifting them they were perfectly guarded at the ladies at the reception. Seemed like none of my books ever got more attention :-).

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Anyway, the audience was really interested in OFM as well. I spoke about What You Should Know about WebLogic 12c (12.2.1) and Docker Containers in the Oracle Universe.

After my presentation I had some good discussions and one even involved me drawing some impromptu technical solution design at the white board. So everyone was happy at the end.

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The Non-Conference Part

With 3 hours left in Lima I headed to one of the best Ceviche places (according to 3 out of 3 cab drivers!) – instead of going directly to the airport with some extra headspace. Obviously I arrived late at the airport but it was worth it. Lovely food, fab atmosphere, great people and good music at the ceviche place place vs. 30 minutes more waiting at the airport. Should I post the name of the restaurant here? Those in the know can tell from the pic I guess.

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OTN Tour Latin America 2016: Chile

Oracle Technology Network Tour Latam 2016:
Santiago de Chile

The conference in Chile was exceptional for a couple of reasons. For the first time ever I met German, the tech reviewer of my WebLogic 12c book. A great guy (not sure if he wants to read his name here – just get the book, he is in the acknowledgement!) who did a brilliant job in editing the 12c book. We had lunch together with his friends from Oracle ACS and the best I can say it felt like friends you know for years and not somebody you met 30 minutes ago. It was a pleasure meeting you guys!

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Conference

The conference itself was the University San Sebastian in Bellavista area. Quite a few presentations were running in several rooms in parallel.

Also Santiago is great. From every traffic jam you can see the mountains! It is really a pity I couldn’t go to any more remote places like Atacama desert or Torre de Paine. Anyway both are now top on my to-travel list. My friends know what this means. Stay tuned.

Again I did a Docker live demo. The audience seemed to like it, what do you think? Also the room was big enough for big ideas. Big thank you to CLOUG and Felipe Manriquez.

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The non Conference Part

I did not really have a lot of time for sightseeing but I managed to nip out and have a seafood lunch at the Mercado Central before heading to airport. Actually a memorable drive, since the Uber driver was driving alongside the runway but was not able to find the airport 🙂

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