OTN Tour Latin America 2016: Uruguay

OTN Tour 2016 Latam Stop in Montevideo

Next stop of the OTN tour after Brazil was Montevideo. We had a perfect start since Nelson from the Oracle User Group in Uruguay picked us up at the airport, we quickly dropped our luggage at the perfect Radisson hotel, had a perfect late lunch at the Mercado Central, with (you can guess it) perfect Tannat red wine, delicious meat and good company of fellow speakers. If Uruguay had been at the end of our trip and not only the second stop I would have bought some bottles of that wine.

The famous shot I always wanted to take myself after seeing it on the cover of some guide book:

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The Event

The event was very professionally organized and running in two auditories at the same time. I was doing my OSB and the FUD about Microservices presentation for the first time and also presented about Docker containers (including a live demo) and had a lot of fun!

Finally I had a copy of my Cloud Computing and Middleware book to give away.

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After Montevideo almost the whole ACE team took the night ferry to Buenos Aires.

Some Impression

Here are some more pics I took during our stay in Montevideo.

 

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The day after the conference I boarded a hop-on hop-off to see a bit of Montevideo and finally had a beautiful walk back from the beach to the city center.

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SOALatam Conference 2015 in Lima Review

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Now that the SOALatam Conference 2015 in Lima is over and work slows down a bit because Christmas is approaching it’s time for a summary. To conclude it was one of the best conferences I attended in 2015. You may ask why I favour SOALatam over the others and there are several reasons:

  • It’s vendor independent.
  • It’s cross technology.
  • Although it is cross technology, it is focusing on new developments, such as Docker, microservices and API Management.
  • It’s small but high quality. Good to fit into one single day!
  • There are brilliant people speaking from major companies such as ThoughtworksS&P Solutions but also independently working folks like Thomas Erl and me 🙂
  • There is a max of 2 parallel tracks (and one is more business oriented), so you never miss out a lot.

audience

I personally enjoyed it because I met a new bunch of colleagues. My presentation was about Linux Containers Docker: Thorough and Critical Overview, covering Docker security, Docker Swarm, Docker Compose and Docker Networking including some predictions for the future. Also I discussed some challenges that show up in a Docker environment when running non 12-factor applications such as Oracle WebLogic Server.

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DOAG Conference 2015 – It’s a wrap!

 

20151117_175947DOAG Conference is completed and it was a good one. I did two presentation, both are available for download now from the official DOAG site and from slidshare:

Also I enjoyed meeting my top 3 customers at the conference, attending some great sessions about Hadoop Security, API management and Dueck’s keynote (elaborating about how to treat techies more like cats than dogs, instead of talking about volkswagening). Also, for the first time we had an Oracle ACE dinner organized by Björn Rost and Martin Klier – thanks to OTN!

 

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WebLogic with Docker in the Cloud

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Docker has been without any doubt the most hyped technology this summer. Apart from incrementally and quickly creating light-weight containers that can be hooked up together it seems to become the de-facto standard for spinning up instances locally and in the cloud. In the past there was no real compatibility between cloud providers on an OS/instance-level and also import/export features were “demanding” at best.

Linux containers for clean sandboxing do exist since much longer, e.g. Google is starting over 2 billion Linux containers every week. With Docker there is an open source based de-facto standard now that customers want to use (honestly, few people looked into lxc and kernel namespaces before Docker had it’s appearance)

Docker and WebLogic?

Oracle WebLogic Server currently does not officially support WebLogic running Docker, yet there is a github project to start with created by Bruno Borges. This project contains the Dockerfile with all necessary WLST-scripts to create a Docker container running WebLogic.

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You can run Docker itself in Oracle Enterprise Linux like in most other Linux distributions such as CentOS, Ubuntu etc. Docker containers always run Linux; e.g. you could have WebLogic running on Ubuntu in a Docker container which is running on CentOS.

Docker Hub Registry

The Docker hub registry is best known as a public registry for Docker images to start with but it can be used to store private images as well.

The Docker Registry contains base Docker images for Java, Ubuntu etc., yet there are no official images from Oracle at the moment. Let’s hope that Oracle will not repeat the rather sad story of poor support for Oracle product AMIs for Amazon Cloud.

Public Clouds can either deploy Docker containers directly from github by creating a container on the fly based on a Dockerfile on github, or by accessing an Docker image stored in the Docker registry. I will demonstrate below how to deploy WebLogic as Docker container straight from the Docker registry.

https://hub.docker.com

Clouds: Amazon, Google, …

Amazon Beanstalk, same as the Google Cloud, support Docker containers as well! So you can dockerize your application (including WebLogic) and run the same Docker image on the cloud. To the best of my knowledge there is currently no information available if Oracle has plans to support Docker in the Oracle cloud.

AWS Beanstalk Cloud

HowTo Run Your WebLogic in a Docker Container on Amazon Beanstalk

The following web cast gives a brief overview of the steps involved. It’s not intended as a A-Z tutorial, rather a quick recording to illustrate the point saving you from dozens of boring screen shots. I am using CentOS 7 to run Docker and create the local Docker container.

The following steps are shown:

  1. Create a running Docker container with WebLogic
  2. Create a new image based on the container
  3. Upload the image to Docker hub
  4. Create the Amazon Beanstalk JSON file for running a Docker container
  5. Create an AWS Beanstalk environment that runs the image from Docker hub
  6. To prove that 1. to 5. are working run a demo app in the cloud

 

If you want to know more, I recommend to get a good book about Clouds, and WebLogic, read Bruno Borges blog entry, the Docker documentation, and the AWS Beanstalk documentation.

Oracle supports the licensing of certain AWS/EC2 instances, also different versions of Oracle Database are available at the Amazon cloud, so ask your Oracle sales rep about the licensing with Docker and Beanstalk.

Enjoy!

Update

I just learned that this posting with the web cast made into the Docker Weekly. Cool, thanks!

Update 2

Soon there will be Microsoft in the boat as well. So Amazon, Google and Microsoft amongst others will support Docker containers. I am curious to see what this will mean for Oracle’s own cloud offering.