ociweekly2
Hey [subscriber:firstname | default:subscriber],

Feels like I should change the title to Monthly Newsletter lately! Very quiet weeks without much to write and now we get couple new major new features out so all good again!

Checkout OCI Service Mesh, VTAP and also some interesting blog posts.

I saw on Twitter that Oracle is planning to release certification for OCI Data Science in May, interesting!

Before I forget, I got a really good advice from Twitter when I was asking about ExaCS scaling capabilities and how they need to be scripted. Did you know there's a script/tool for that which you can find in MOS?

(ODyS) Oracle Dynamic Scaling engine - Scale-up and Scale-down automation utility for OCI DB System (ExaCS/ExaC@C) (Doc ID 2719916.1)

What's new?

OCI Service Mesh is now available for everyone! You can add features to your cloud native microservice applications. You can manage security, control traffic and add observability features through your application code.

Documentation is here.

Official announcement post from Oracle.
Another major feature is VTAP (Virtual Testing Access Point) being available. With VTAP you can mirror your traffic in VCN to another endpoint which collects and analyzes the traffic. Collector can be for example third party product like Palo Alto.

I see constant demand on security and observability features with network so this is welcomed addition to what OCI offers. Will be interesting to see how we need to adjust our way of designing systems.

As of right now, VTAP sources can be:
  • A single compute instance VNIC in a subnet
  • A Load Balancer
  • A Database system
  • An Exadata VM Cluster
  • An Autonomous Data Warehouse instance using a private endpoint
VTAP documentation is here.

Official announcement and some additional usecases here.

There's been also some updates to FastConnect, take a look on FastConnect updates from here. They go into more details with bidirectional forwarding detection for example.
Smaller one but Security Zones now support also some File Storage policies and follow the best practices around the service,
If you're using OCI US Gov Cloud, then last weeks have been a treat! Bunch of services got approved to be used with Gov Cloud.

  • Autonomous Database (on shared or dedicated Exadata infrastructure)
  • Data Catalog
  • Logging
  • Oracle Integration Cloud
  • Service Connector Hub
  • VCN Flow Logs
I don't have access to new OCI IAM Identity Domains yet to look on this feature yet, but you can centralize your Autonomous Database user management in IAM now. If the Autonomous Database is configured properly, then users can authenticate using their IAM passwords.

Pretty cool integration and something one would wish cloud would enable us to do!
There's new Cost Management widget for the OCI Dashboards. Remember the new feature where you can set widget to your after-logon dashboard.
New spring release for OCI Database Migration Service. You can see OCI DMS uses ZDM in the background as features are same what ZDM 21.3 also brought in, like using CPAT or having AWS RDS as source DB.

Still great that they're using ZDM there, if you're familiar with ZDM them using OCI DMS will be easy too!

Blogs & News

Here's a long (and good!) read about OCI Cloud Native patterns when it comes to streaming, definitely worth studying!
Slightly older post from A-team but it goes into more details on overriding CIS Landing Zone Terraform templates when needed. If you haven't looked on CIS Landing Zone what's available for OCI, I would definitely take a look!
Here are more details on DRG filtering enhancements what have been introduced to Dynamic Routing Gateway.
Did you know you can use MobaXterm together with OCI Bastion Service? Martin has details on it!
Check this post on ExaC@C error with dbaascli.
And here's a two post series on OCI Bastion Service. How to use it to connect to your private subnet - part 1. And how to create Bastion Service/Session using automated tools.
If you worked with OCI FastConnect, you probably have gone few discussions if the bandwidth is sufficient or if there are any problems with it. This two post series has some details on how to increase throughput on FastConnect.

Part 1.

Part 2.

Remember


Contact me via Twitter @svilmune or just send an email if you have any ideas, comments or if you see I'm missing some good source for the weekly news.

I'm not in partnership with Oracle in any way so all opinions are my personal views and should not be taken as an official statement from Oracle.

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Have an awesome day, thanks for reading!

Simo
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