Tag: Automation

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.

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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.

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Google Cloud SQL Custom Backups

In one of my previous posts I’ve noted that the GCP Cloud SQL for SQL Server doesn’t have point of time recovery as of March 2022. As result the default out of box backups can only provide RPO as 24 hours or more. The exact RPO might vary from day to day since you can only specify a window for backup but not exact time. So far it seems like the only reasonable approach to reduce the RPO is to schedule on-demand backups, and in this post I am going to show how you can do that using a couple of different approaches.

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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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Oracle OCI Resource Manager Discovery.

If you work with Terraform, you are quite familiar with the situation when a lot of resources have already been deployed manually. What options do we have in such a case? The first one is to use the native Terraform Resource Discovery and create the state file, which can be imported to your enterprise configuration. But if you plan to use Resource Manager in OCI, you can use the new Resource Manager Discovery feature. It creates a stack discovering your resources in a compartment.

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