Development – Running in the clouds

Oracle Apex on Autonomous with custom ORDS

In one of my recent blogs I’ve described how you can use Nginx as a reverse proxy to assign your custom domain name to the Oracle Apex on Autonomous database. But you still use the default ORDS managed by Oracle. What if you want to change some ORDS parameters? For example you might decide to change the “low” type of connection to “high” or “medium”. In this post I will describe how to install your custom ORDS to work with Autonomous databases in standalone mode, using only Tomcat and Apache http server with Tomcat as the frontend.

Sample Go application with database backend

Yes, this is one more sample app as there are probably thousands already on the internet. We have tons of sample apps from different vendors with various types of licenses available on different repositories. Nevertheless sometimes I struggle to find exactly what I need – a simple app with a database backend which can work with Oracle Autonomous databases and optionally with Postgres backend. In my everyday life I primarily use Go as a programming language and I would like to have such an app written using that language. So, eventually I gave up and created my own application with a simple frontend and two (as for now) options for backend databases – Oracle and Postgres.

Oracle Apex on ATP with custom domain

If you have an Apex app on top of your Oracle Autonomous database you have the application URL like https://m5c5hpup7eqqydh-glebatp01.adb.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloudapps.com/ords/r/covid/covid-ontario/covid_ontario. This is already better than it used to be before and have a friendly path in the URL but what if you want to use your own domain address and custom URL? This blog is about how to set it up using reverse proxy. The way with a custom ORDS is a subject for another post.

So, you have your own domain registered in DNS, for example apex.gleb.ca and an application like I’ve listed above. What you want to do is to make the application URL as https://www.apex.gleb.ca/covid/ . What we are going to use is a virtual machine with a Nginx web server serving as a reverse proxy to your Apex application created on the Oracle Autonomous database.

AlloyDB backups management

The post is about backup management for AlloyDB. It might be useful for the time when it is written but, probably, will be obsolete very soon when tools and API for the service will mature.
A couple of words about AlloyDB backups and how they are created. The backups are quite different from the default backups for Cloud SQL for example. As we know in Cloud SQL all the backups are bound to the instance. What it means is when the instance is deleted then all the backups disappear along with the instance. It makes sense if the backups behind the scenes are storage snapshots from the databases. But in AlloyDB all the backups are decoupled from the cluster and exist by themselves. If you delete a cluster the backups stay. I think it is a way better approach because it provides a better way to protect from some mistakes when an instance is deleted before making a clone or exporting the data. As for now you can see all the backups for existing and deleted instances using the “backups” tab in the console, gcloud utility or listing using GCP REST API.

Make your developers productive and happy.

When we discuss designing a new application or about IT services in general we talk a lot about end user interface, end user experience, cost of downtime and a thousand other things. But I don’t remember having too many discussions about developer, infrastructure engineer or IT consultant experience and how they deal with all the processes and tools surrounding each and every step of developing and implementation of the application or infrastructure. Let me explain what I mean.

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