Category: Infrastructure As Code

Blog on Oracle OCI ARM free tier.

This blog was primarily driven by questions from my peers and colleagues who wondered where my blog was hosted and how it was created. It might help to move from a hosting platform to your own website and where to start.

Like most bloggers I started my blog using one of the hosting platforms but soon after found some limitations in choosing appearance, plugins and was a bit annoyed by some commercial banners on my page. After a while I decided to move to my own site. I bought a domain name for myself and created my own environment using the WordPress software on a cloud VM. It didn’t cost me too much but it was not entirely for free. When Oracle introduced some additions to the always free set of resources. I decided to give it a try and move my blog entirely to the OCI free tier.

For those who would like to skip the reading and try, I have a set of Terraform scripts on GitHub. They haven’t been updated lately and use not the latest versions but can be a good place to start.

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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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Terraform modules simplified.

Terraform is probably already the de-facto standard for cloud deployment. I use it on a daily basis deploying and destroying my tests and demo setups in my Oracle cloud tenancy. Sometimes the deployment environment for a demo has too many files or some files inside are really big and hard to read due to the number of different resources and parameters included there. How can we make our configuration more usable? Let’s try Terraform modules and demonstrate how they work.
For our tests we are going to use terraform v1.0.3 and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). You will need a working OCI and on your machine with terraform defined environment variables. The full list of required environment variables will be provided in the README file in the GitHub repository.
Let’s say we have a simple demo or test configuration with a dedicated network, internet gateway and a VM. And we want to assign multiple security rules using security lists and maybe one or two security groups. We can include all those rules to the configuration file for the network but maybe there is a better way. What if we want to reuse the similar set of the security rules and security groups not only to that deployment but share with some other stacks? We can try to use Terraform modules.

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Upgrading Terraform command line to the latest version.

Some time ago I updated my terraform command line tool to the version 0.15.3 and was surprised how easy it went. Originally I planned to write a blog but it was not too much to write about. The upgrades to version 11 or 13 were much more painful. Last week HashiCorp announced Terraform version 1.0 General Availability and it meant that the time for a new upgrade had come. I upgraded it on one of my machines and decided to write a short blog about both upgrades to encourage people to try and do the upgrade.

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