Oracle Open World 2015

November 2, 2015 by frank 2 Comments

#OOW15 Wrap

Oracle Open World is finished and IMHO it was great! What I particularly enjoyed was that Oracle this year delivered a lot of what was announced last year. The cloud offerings seem to be heading the right way (Oracle uses industry accepted terms now when talking about cloud, concludes to my definitions and delivers across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). In addition Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.2.1, in particular WebLogic 12.2.1 is out with multi tenancy micro containers, exportable partitions, a brand new REST management interface, new JDK support, new Java EE 7 support, policies, actions and true elasticity.

WebLogic Server 12.2.1 new features slides

The slides for my “12 Things You Should Know About Oracle WebLogic Server 12.2.1” presentation are available on slideshare:

12 Things You Should Know About WebLogic Server 12.2.1 #oow2015 from Frank Munz

Filed Under: oracle

Oracle Open World Expert Session: WebLogic 12cR2 (12.2.1)

October 18, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

iamspeaking oow15 I will be presenting an expert session together with Dave Cabelus from Oracle WebLogic product management about the newest WebLogic 12c at Oracle Open World 2015.

Do you know about WebLogic 12 resource management policies for heap that can trigger a slow action? WebLogic’s microcontainer for multi tenancy? Scale up actions for elastic clusters? createForms for the RESTful management APIs? why Docker is almost zero overhead, how Docker works with WebLogic and that it is officially certified by Oracle?

Come and see us, Tuesday 18h.

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: 12.2.1, oow, oracle open world, presentation, weblogic, wls12c

IaaS Competition: It’s not only about the pricing.

October 7, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

IaaS has become much much more than just compute on demand with an API and pay per use. Interesting to note that Oracle cloud announced to match AWS IaaS prices for their customers which is a cool and bold move. Obviously this will help to keep Oracle customers on the Oracle cloud.

AWS IaaS actually is more. You can have cheap reserved instances and even cheaper spot instances. Today AWS announced spot instances with a block duration for jobs that need to be finished but run economically. Good to see that competition keeps bringing new features. Remember when many years ago I wrote about the benefits for customers that will be caused by cloud computing? Nowadays this has become a fact.

There are more public cloud advantages and features you should know.

Filed Under: aws, CloudComputing, oracle Tagged With: aws, block duration, oracle cloud, spot instances

DOAG Conference 2015 Middleware & Volkswagening

October 5, 2015 by frank 2 Comments

DOAG Conference 2015 in Nürnberg is getting closer. This is a great opportunity to hear about what is announced at Oracle Open World 2015, mingle with peers and enjoy this years’ invited speaker Gunter Dueck. He published an essay about volkswagening (german only) that is worth reading. Reminds a bit about the graphic card producers that optimized their card specifically for the benchmarks used by IT magazines a couple of years ago. Anyway, Gunter Dueck is worth listening to – another reason to attend DOAG conference!

I usually tell German IT professionals and even attendees at international workshops that this is the must-do event if you are even only remotely working with Oracle technology. It’s great because it’s full of Oracle tech. Although it’s not only about the Oracle red opinion because there are lots of consulting companies, individuals and people like me presenting :-).

Make sure you don’t miss out the two presentations that I will deliver this year about WebLogic 12c features and about Docker. Also think about doing your own presentation maybe next year. You will get a free entry ticket (not mentioning all the fame due to the presentation).

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: conference, doag, Docker, weblogic, wls 12.2

The Difference: Docker vs. Virtualization

September 21, 2015 by frank 5 Comments

Technical Basics

Docker is an open source container technology that became immensely popular in 2014. Docker itself is written in Google’s programming language Go and supported on all major Linux distributions (RedHat, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu etc.). The technical underpinnings are not completely new, Docker leverages Linux kernel features for containers such as cgroups and namespaces. So even though Docker itself is relatively new, the underlying container technology is an established technology. Docker containers run on top of an operating system.

It is reported that Google starts 2 000 000 000 every week for search, mail, etc.

Virtualization versus Container

It’s important to distinguish Linux containers and Docker from traditional and more common type 1 or type 2 hypervisors. Type 1 hypervisors provide server virtualization with different operating systems on bare metal hardware, whereas Type 2 hypervisors often provide desktop virtualization based on an existing operating system as shown below.

In contrast to popular virtualization technologies, Docker containers run the host’s Linux kernel. Docker is about isolation, not about virtualization. The required time to startup a container is only in the range of milliseconds. Still containers have their own incremental files system, where layers are reused across containers. In addition, every container has its own network stack, therefore its own IP-address, and its own process space.

Filed Under: CloudComputing Tagged With: Docker, virtualbox, virtualization

12 Public Cloud Benefits and Features You Should Know

September 17, 2015 by frank 5 Comments

The last few years I spent a quite a bit of time talking about public clouds. When I published my cloud computing book, public clouds were mostly still believed to be a hype. Availability, security, persistence of data, and much much more was questioned.

Today only few IT professionals are stuck with this old school thinking. The major public clouds are a superset of what is provided by a classical data centers.

What features would you check for when looking at a potential cloud provider? Does your data center offer every feature and service listed below?

All IT in the cloud is software. There is an API for everything. The whole data center is a set of APIs. This includes load balancers, servers, storage, databases, application servers, API gateways, firewalls, storage, etc.
Short term capacity is very cheap.
Since capacity is cheap, typically you don’t update or redeploy in the cloud, instead you spin up new immutable servers.
Changing your hardware costs nothing. If you find out or assume that your application will run better on high-CPU instances instead of high-memory instances you can simply swap.
Availability comes with no extra cost. You can place two instances in two fully redundant data centers for the same cost as placing two instances in the same data center.
Also parallelism comes with no extra cost. Using 1000 instances for 1h costs as much as using 1 instance for 1000 hours. You’ve got a massively parallel supercomputer at your hands.
You save the time for capacity planning since capacity is available on demand.
Capacity planning still makes sense for predicting future costs.
Procurement happens within seconds or minutes.
You don’t pay for unused resources. Scaling down reduces your costs.
You can put IT resources close to the customer location where they are needed since the public cloud will be globally available.
Cost for resources in the cloud used to drop by around 30% every year. Long term projects with constant resource usage will cost less every year.

You care to disagree?

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: cloud computing, ec2, gce, google cloud, oracle cloud

OTN Tour Latin America 2015: Colombia

September 7, 2015 by frank 1 Comment

Cali

col gold Colombia was my last stop on the OTN tour, yet it was the country I was waiting for. I had good memories about the country from many years ago when I was backpacking there and it was a pleasure to see how everything has changed.

I decided to take a hotel in the north which is closer to the some shopping malls and various museums. At night after arrival I got a local SIM card which was a breeze and cost less than 10€ for 1 GB of data. First day I nipped out, crossed the main street to the Alcaldía and headed straight to the Museo del Oro Calima (Gold Museum).

The conference was organized by charming Giovanna Bohorquez Paez and her team from the Asociación de Usuarios Oracle de Colombia. Everything went swimmingly and I felt flattered to give a Docker and WebLogic presentation at the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente. Due to some changes there was no time left for my 12 Things about WebLogic 12c presentation but feel free to download the presentation slides. For the first time I had the pleasure to meet Mauricio Naranjo in person. During the coffee break we had a exotic looking but surprisingly well tasting drink called Champús (check this wiki link for a pic!).

Altogether I enjoyed the conference a lot. It was a great atmosphere, people came to ask questions and to have their pictures taken together with us. To respect their privacy I put a picture of us below.

At the end, I decided to stay an extra day, visited some lookouts and local bars with a friend who also gave me a lift to the mountain range called KM18. Calenos love to go there because it is much cooler, so it is really crowded on Sundays. There I had an even stranger but also even tastier (!!) drink called agua de panela (sweet hot drink made of sugar cane) with savory cheese in it. Loved it!

12 Things About WebLogic 12.1.3 #oow2014 #otnla15 from Frank Munz

OTNLA Tour 2015: Docker and WebLogic 12c from Frank Munz

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: Docker, otnla15, presentation, wls12c

OTN Tour Latin America 2015: Ecuador

September 7, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

Quito

Quito first of all surprises by its altitude. The altitude of the city of Quito is pretty much the height the highest mountain in Germany (2880m). I was absolutely looking forward to be in Quito, since the last time I was there was more than 20 years ago when I was backpacking through South America.

For me the event was another wonderful hotel and another perfectly organized conference with a surprisingly high number of attendees! Both my sessions were well attended, I’d guess up to 80 people, and there was even live translation provided for the attendees! Also I liked the idea of two parallel streams only, so at the end we had more attendees in each stream. In my Docker presentation I focused even more on a longer live demonstration accompanied by a few slides only.

Paola, our charming host did everything to make the event a great success. She invited us for a guided city trip so we had a chance to see the equator, the historic center and Panecillo, the mountain overlooking Quito and the city center. At night we went again to Panecillo for a excellent dinner and a view of the city’s lights.

Oracle ACE Directors: Heli, Frank, Ronald, Deiby

Btw, I uploaded the WebLogic with Docker and 12 new features of Oracle WebLogic Server 12c presentation slides to slideshare.

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: Docker, otn tour, weblogic

OTN Tour Latin America 2015: Panama

September 6, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

Panama City

Panama was another interesting place to be. Very few Europeans I know have ever been to Panama. The trip from the airport started with a glimpse of Panama’s surprising skyline. Pleasant enough I was located in the 29th floor (!) of a downtown hotel.

20150821_095650 The conference was a bit further away towards the canal at another hotel next to one of the biggest shopping malls in the known universe.

I had the last slot and since we were running late, people volunteered to stay a bit longer for my Oracle WebLogic and Docker presentation.

Saturday we had a day off. Edgardo Sanchez from the local user group took us on a trip to the Panama canal and Casco Antiguo (the historic center of town). I am not a good shopper, usually I am buying nothing at all, but at the end I bought a Panama coffee mug as a souvenir.

Btw, I uploaded the WebLogic with Docker and 12 new features of Oracle WebLogic Server 12c presentation slides.

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: Docker, weblogic, wls12c

OTN Tour Latin America 2015: El Salvador

September 5, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

San Salvador

In San Salvador I had the best hotel experience. I got upgraded for no particular reason to the executive lounge which provides a view to the local volcano (and free soft drinks).

Also I met Alex Gorbatchev from Python for the first time in person. The conference was at a military club in a very relaxed and safe atmosphere. Anyway, I felt a bit like the scene in the Monty Python clip with the comfy chair since it was really hot and we faced a splendid swimming pool without having the time and/or possibility to go for a swim.

Again I did two presentations one about Docker in general and its usage for WebLogic with and one about 12 new features of Oracle WebLogic Server 12c both with great audience feedback and participation. After the session there was a high number of people asking for the slides and trying to get some answers on additional topics. My impression was that a smallish but very interested group of people is working with WebLogic and that everybody was curious about Docker.

Same as in Guatemala the conference ended with a picture taking session 🙂 Heli from Finland has another blog posting about the fun part of our trip.

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: Docker, oracle espanol, otn tour, weblogic, wls12c

OTN Tour Latin America 2015: Guatemala

September 4, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

Guatemala City

I attended this year’s OTN Latin America 2015 tour and travelled across 5 countries.

Guatemala was one of the places I always wanted to visit so I arrived a day early on own expenses. My flight was via FRA and Houston and I arrived at GUA City an hour and half before midnight. My suitcase did not. It took an hour until somebody from UA showed up at the airport so I missed Deiby from the local user group who volunteered to pick me up at the airport on a Friday night.

The following day I did a trip to the historic city of Antigua, the old capital including a guided walk through the center and an easy walk up to Cerro de la Cruz which offers a breathtaking view to the surrounding volcanoes and Antigua.

The conference itself was an excellent experience (thanks to Deiby Gomez and his colleagues!), perfectly organized and coordinated with a great mixture and huge number of local and international speakers. For the first time I met Daniel Morgan, Anton Els (see his posting for the fantastic boring / exciting pic we took!), Edward Roske, Björn Rost and Jeff Davies in person. One of the cool things of an OTN tour is that you can listen also to a lot of great people so I attended most of Dan’s and Jeff’s session but unfortunately missed Anton’s sessions.

My own session was well attended. I guess that over 100 people showed up which was a big surprise to me! My Spanish is slightly above Tarzan level, still I decided to give the introduction in Spanish and the rest in English, which on the one hand side was confusing for the live interpreter and on the other hand side entertaining for the audience. At the end of the day we had a lovely speakers dinner playing a bit of golf while having excellent food.

You can download the slides for my presentations on Slideshare:

12 Things you should know about WebLogic 12c

WebLogic 12c and Docker (includes a basic Docker introduction)

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: Docker, otn, weblogic, wls12c

Interview in Oracle Magazine

June 5, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

I was interviewed in this month’s edition of the Oracle Magazine. Apart from myself in a life vest and talking about Yosemite, you can also see René van Wijk in his outdoor look.

Also I recommend to get the magazine and read what Tom Kyte has to say about DB security: It’s an interesting article about least privileges and multiple schemas that goes beyond the often heard recommendation of using prepared statements.

Filed Under: oracle

Access WebLogic LogFiles with the RESTful Management Interface

April 9, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

At some expert panel a fortnight ago it was discussed how nice it would be to access the WebLogic logfiles via a simple REST request. Here is how it works:

Configuration

Enable the RESTful management interface in WebLogic under DOMAIN / Configuration / General / Advanced. It’s a non-dynamic change, so restart the admin server.

Access Log Files

Once the RESTful management is enabled simply use your preferred REST client. One possibility is to use the browser either by typing the URI directly and submitting a GET request. Yet a REST plugin as shown below might be the more comfortable option:

For the URI make sure to use host:port of the admin server.
On the response view simply click on the log file that interests you.

Alternatively you can use the UNIX command-line curl:

$ curl --user weblogic:welcome1  -X GET http://localhost:7001/management/wls/latest/servers/id/AdminServer/logs/id/ServerLog

Which URI?

Use the correct SERVER_NAME, e.g. AdminServer in the URI management/wls/latest/servers/id/SERVER_NAME/logs/id/HTTPAccessLog
and replace HTTPAccessLog with the log file you are interested in, such as DataSourceLog, DomainLog, ServerLog.

More?

I explained the benefits of using REST for operations in a previous article which also contains a reference to a 2 minute tech tip recorded by OTN.

Make sure to browse the official Oracle WebLogic documentation here.

Filed Under: oracle

Latest Review of Middleware and Cloud Computing Book

April 2, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

I gifted 3 copies of my Middleware and Cloud Computing book for Christmas.

One of the winners even wrote a review on Amazon.com. He seems to enjoy the book, so good news :-).

Although it was published as early as 2011 (a year before Larry Ellison announced the Oracle public cloud!) it continuous to be a comprehensive resource to understand how public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace work, what is mandatory for a real cloud and why it is such a long journey for Oracle to get there.

Filed Under: oracle

Using HTTP instead of T3 for WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST)

March 18, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

A friend of mine asked why the WLST connection from the Jython based scripting tool is only working with t3. IMHO using t3 for WLST is not a big deal since it is a WebLogic tool talking to WebLogic itself, and t3 was built and optimised for that.

You might want to replace t3 with HTTP anyway, e.g. for one the following reasons:

– for the sake of standards, you want to use as many standard protocols as possible. t3 is WebLogic vendor specific.

– you might have problems with t3 when connecting through firewalls.

Easy Solution

Here is the good news. Unknown to many, WLST does work with HTTP if you enable tunneling for the Admin server ( Admin Server / Protocols / General ).

then it’ possible to use HTTP for WLST:

wls:/offline> connect('weblogic','welcome1','http://localhost:7001')

Connecting to http://localhost:7001 with userid weblogic ...
Successfully connected to Admin Server "AdminServer" that belongs to domain "simon".
Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the 
server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or 
Admin port should be used instead.

Using a Network Channel

Alternatively if you want to separate the admin traffic but not use SSL (which would be enforced e.g. by using the administration port feature of WebLogic), you could create a network channel under Admin Server / Protocols / Channels for the t3 protocol, e.g. on port 8888 and enable “Tunneling” for that channel. Note that http is already enabled for the channel but this is not enough, you must enable tunneling.

Administration Port

The third and most secure possibility of course is using tunneling in combination with the administration port.

Comments:

– You do not need the administration port for using WLST with HTTP.

– It’s not required to change WLST from t3 to HTTP. This posting only shows how it can be done if one of the reasons above apply to you.

– Changing other clients from t3 to IIOP or so, e.g. JMS clients or standalone Java clients using RMI typically has more implications which are not discussed here.

More?

If you want to learn more about the basics WebLogic scripting tool I recommend to start with the following web cast.

Filed Under: oracle, WebLogic 12c Book Tagged With: 12.1.3, admin, monitoring, weblogic, wls12c, wlst

OUGN Conference 2015 Trip Report

March 16, 2015 by frank Leave a Comment

Saturday night I returned from my trip to Oslo where I attended the OUGN2015 conference. Myself, I presented some exciting WebLogic 12.1.3 features doing a rather technical hands-on demo with a few slides only. As usually, I tried to mention the existing show stoppers. Indeed I had no fixed agenda, instead I tried to make best use of the allotted 45 minutes showing as much as possible which worked out well.
Seems like the attendees were most impressed by my demo using the new RESTful API in a combination with URLs typed into the browser, curl, Python and a REST plugin to create and test a JDBC data source.

(thx to Michel Schildmeijer for this pic!)

Overall it was a fabulous event – not only (but also) because it was hosted on a cruise ship. Since I recently explored the Hadoop eco system and big data myself, I highly enjoyed the keynote given by James Morle ( “map reduce is dead”, “the industry suffers from overly complex systems”). Also I largely agree on what calls the “idiot factor” in IT.

I attended some strategy and middleware sessions, but I learned most about big data. Good to see that Oracle is not missing the boat here with technologies like Kafka, Spark and Storm but nicely integrates with them.

Also exploring Oslo was lovely! It was my first time there and I checked out some cafes, the harbour area and a few museums, including the Viking Ship museums and the Kon-Tiki museum where you can see the vessel that Heyerdahl used to cross the pacific with his men and a parrot.

Apart from learning something new, what matters about a conference is who do you meet and who do you chat with. OUGN2015 was well worth the trip!

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: big data, conference, keynote, ougn2015, wls12c

Winners of the Christmas Cloud Book Raffle

January 19, 2015 by frank 2 Comments

The winners for the yearly Christmas Book raffle were drawn. Three people won a copy of Middleware and Cloud Computing Book:

Jean-Nicola M. (drawn for FB retrweet)
@HeshamAboElMagd (retweet)
@ashish__awasthi (retweet)

Enjoy the book guys. It’s on the way already!

Filed Under: oracle

Base64 Encode / Decode with Python (or WebLogic Scripting Tool)

December 11, 2014 by frank 2 Comments

I had to estimate the effort for decoding a Base64 encoded message. Honestly 🙂 A reminder to self (and for others working in the dark spheres of lowest level integration).

Python / WLST

You can easily decode a Base64 message in Python. With WebLogic installed this obviously is working with WLST (also in offline mode). No imports, no nothing, no questions asked:

‘Base64Encoded_String’.decode(‘base64’)

Online (I am tempted to write PaaS 🙂 )

For a quick I-need-to-get-this-decoded solution try one of the online services such as

https://www.base64decode.org which is working pretty well for me.

Filed Under: oracle

Christmas Book Raffle

November 29, 2014 by frank 3 Comments

Win a free copy of Middleware and Cloud Computing

I just completed a 1 day Multi-Cloud Computing workshop in Nuremberg covering Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Oracle and Openshift – all the major clouds and how clouds impact software development.

Christmas is just a few weeks away and I am gifting 3 copies of my Middleware and Cloud Computing book.

All you need to do to participate is either share the Facebook posting:

Beitrag von Oracle WebLogic Book.

or retweet the following tweet

I will gift 3 copies of my Middleware and Cloud Computing book this Dec. RT to participate. http://t.co/D8F3O5xRpq pic.twitter.com/K1Dk5XBGdk

— Frank Munz ☁ (@frankmunz) December 5, 2014

Good luck!

No purchase required 🙂 no cash disbursement and/or an replacement of the prizes is possible,Deadline is Dec 19th, 2014.

Filed Under: oracle

Cloud Workshop (AWS, Google, OpenShift, Oracle, Rackspace, Netflix OSS, Docker)

November 29, 2014 by frank 1 Comment

Cloud Training Course

A fortnight ago I was running a hands-on cloud training day in Nuremberg covering the most important public clouds and how clouds change software development.

Feedback

I actually tried, but with 30 attendees I was even too busy to take a picture of the overcrowded room (the workshop was fully booked). Anyway, feedback forms say that 97% were very happy or happy with the workshop.

thanks!

ps. Don’t miss out the Christmas book raffle.

Filed Under: oracle

WebLogic Startup Customization: setUserOverrides.sh

October 24, 2014 by frank 2 Comments

Many people modify the setDomainEnv.sh file that specifies the core settings for a WebLogic domain, e.g. for adding debug or monitoring ports or additional switches for the JVM:

DOMAIN_HOME/bin/setDomainEnv.sh

I confess, I do the same for quick and dirty hacks, yet changes here will be overwritten during a domain upgrade. It’s much better to put such changes into the following config file:

DOMAIN_HOME/bin/setUserOverrides.sh

Your changes will remain even when updating a domain, also they will be respected by pack/unpack. Check out the official Oracle documentation.

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: weblogic, wls12c

#OOW15 Wrap

WebLogic Server 12.2.1 new features slides

Technical Basics

Virtualization versus Container

Cali

Quito

Panama City

San Salvador

Guatemala City

Configuration

Access Log Files

Which URI?

More?

Easy Solution

Using a Network Channel

Administration Port

Comments:

More?

Python / WLST

Online (I am tempted to write PaaS 🙂 )

Win a free copy of Middleware and Cloud Computing

No purchase required 🙂 no cash disbursement and/or an replacement of the prizes is possible,Deadline is Dec 19th, 2014.

Cloud Training Course

Feedback

DOAG Schulungstag 2014

Cloud Computing und Public Clouds: Was Sie wissen müssen – gezeigt anhand von live und hands-on Beispielen

Zielgruppe: