How to create Oracle MySQL Cloud Service

Oracle MySQL Cloud Service is a single MySQL server having full access to the features and its operations.

Steps in creating an instance of Oracle MySQL Cloud Service

1. Login to your cloud account.
2. From Action Menu, select Open Service Console

3. Click Create Service
4. Input the Instance Name, Region and Availability Domain

5. Next page, input the compute shape, ssh key, cloud storage container, username, password, storage size, administrator username, password, database schema name and port.

6. Once you confirm, you could see the mysql instance running in your dashboard.
7. With your ssh keys and inputed connection string, you can either ssh or connect database from your application.

Appendix

MySQL Cloud Service

How to create an Object Storage in OCI

Purpose:
Object storage in OCI is an internet-scale, high-performance storage platform that offers reliable and cost-efficient data durability. It can hold
your static contents like images, pdfs, files etc. There are two types of storage tier - Standard (hot storage) and Archive (cold storage).

Steps in creating Object Storage:
1. Login to your OCI account.
2. Navigate to Menu --> Object Storage --> Object Storage

3. Click on "Create Bucket"
4. Select the storage tier, by default it will be Standard

Appendix:
Overview of Storage
Managing Buckets

How to create an OKE cluster

Purpose: 
Creating an OKE cluster in OCI. Once cluster is ready, you can deploy your application.

Assumption:
1. You already have an OCI account with proper roles and policies to create and configure OKE.
2. You have a VCN, subnets

Steps in setup and configuration:
1. Login to your OCI account.
2. Navigate to Menu --> Developer Services --> Container Clusters (OKE)

3. Choose the correct compartment
4. Click on the "Create Cluster" button and input the name, K8s version, VCN, subnets and if needed the CIDR block for the b8s service.

5. Wait for some time, the Cluster status needs to change from "Creating" to "Active"
6. Click on the created cluster name
7. Add Node Pool
8. Input name, version, image, shape, subnets, quantity per subnet, public ssh key and labels.
9. Wait for some time, you can see the node pools getting machine allocated and it will install all the necessary softwares and packages.
10. Once its ready, you can login to those worker machines.

How to Access Kubeconfig:
Following steps demonstrated how to access the OKE kubeconfig file.
1. You need to download and install the OCI CLI and configure it for use.
2. mkdir -p $HOME/.kube
3. oci ce cluster create-kubeconfig --cluster-id ocid1.cluster.oc1.eu-frankfurt-1.aaaand --file $HOME/.kube/config

More links:
https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/ContEng/Concepts/contengprerequisites.htm
https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/API/SDKDocs/cliinstall.htm?tocpath=Developer%20Tools%20%7CCommand%20Line%20Interface%20(CLI)%20%7C_____1
https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/API/SDKDocs/cliconfigure.htm?tocpath=Developer%20Tools%20%7CCommand%20Line%20Interface%20(CLI)%20%7C_____2
https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/tools/oci-cli/latest/oci_cli_docs/cmdref/ce.html#description

Introduction to rsync, a free powerful tool for syncing data

Rsync (Remote Sync) is a command for copying and synchronizing files and directories remotely as well. You can easily mirror your data by comparing source and destination.
For a typical transfer, rsync compares filenames and file timestamps on the source and destination directory trees to assess which files should be transferred.
Also rsync can effectively resume transfers that have been halted or interrupted.

Advantages of Rsync:

• It efficiently copies and sync files to or from a remote system.
• Supports copying links, devices, owners, groups and permissions.
• It’s faster than scp (Secure Copy).
• Rsync consumes less bandwidth

How to install Rsync:
By default rsync package is bundled with OS, else you need to use your package mangers like yum, apt-get to install rsync.

Basic Syntax:
rsync [options] source destination

Some common options used with rsync commands:
-v : verbose
-a : archive mode
-z : compress file data
-h : human-readable
-r : copies data recursively 

Here are some of the examples, have a try in a test environment or use a dry run option:

1. Copy/Sync a File on a Local Computer
[root@shvijai]# rsync -zvh myfilesp.tar /tmp/backups/

2. Copy a Directory from Local Server to a Remote Server
[root@shvijai]$ rsync -avz www/ root@192.168.0.101:/home/

3. Copy/Sync a Remote Directory to a Local Machine
[root@shvijai]# rsync -avzh root@192.168.0.100:/home/shvijai/www-files /tmp/mywebsite

4. Copy a File from a Remote Server to a Local Server with SSH
[root@shvijai]# rsync -avzhe ssh root@192.168.0.100:/root/backup.log /tmp/

5. Copy a File from a Local Server to a Remote Server with SSH
[root@shvijai]# rsync -avzhe ssh mybackup.tar root@192.168.0.100:/mybackups/

6. Use of –include and –exclude Options
[root@shvijai]# rsync -avze ssh --include 'R*' --exclude '*' root@192.168.0.101:/var/lib/rpm/ /mnt/rpm

7. Use of –delete Option
[root@shvijai]# rsync -avz --delete root@192.168.0.100:/var/lib/rpm/ .

8. Automatically Delete source Files after successful Transfer
[root@shvijai]# rsync --remove-source-files -zvh mybackup.tar /mnt/mybackups/

9. Do a Dry Run with rsync
root@shvijai]# rsync --dry-run --remove-source-files -zvh mybackup.tar /mnt/mybackups/

Setting up a NAT instance in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Goal

In multi tier architecure design, we are placing our databases in a private subnet with no public IP and web-servers in public subnet which can have public IP. The Idea here is only the front end web-servers will be able to communicate with the backend servers, and backend servers cannot be directly accessed by outside world. But in some cases we may need internet access on private subnet machines for updating/installing softwares, patches etc. Here I will show you how to achieve this goal by using a NAT instance in OCI.

What we are going to do?

Our plan is to configure a Linux box in public subnet as a router (NAT - Network Address Translation). All the machines in the private subnet to initiate outbound IPv4 traffic to the internet at the same time those instances are prevent from receiving inbound traffic initiated by someone on the internet. The route table for those machines in private subnet will be the nat instance IP.

Architecture

Assumption

• You have an OCI account with needed permissions to create instance, network components.
• You already have a compartment to work on.

Follow the steps to reach our goal

Create VCN and Internet Gateway

Create a VCN with CIDR block value will be 10.0.0.0/16

Create Public and Private Route tables

Create Private and Public Security Rules

We can add rules later for each security list, let it be clean now

Create Private and Public Subnet

Private subnet maps to CIDR Block 10.0.0.0/24 , Private Route Table, Private Security List and Public subnet maps to CIDR Block 10.0.10.0/24 , Public Route Table, Public Security List

Edit Public and Private Security List to allow the following IP and protocol

Ingres Rules for Public Subnet

- Allow SSH from anywhere 0.0.0.0/0
- Allow Ping ICMP from hosts in the Private Subnet 10.0.0.0/24
- Allow TCP from hosts in the Private Subnet 10.0.0.0/24

Egress Rules for Public Subnet

- Allow outgoing All Protocols to go out Everywhere 0.0.0.0/0
Ingres Rules for Private Subnet

- Allow SSH from 10.0.10.24

Egress Rules for Private Subnet

-Allow Outgoing all protocols to everywhere 0.0.0.0/0

Create backend Server , Attach it to Private Subnet

Create NAT Instance , Attach it to Public Subnet

VNIC Configurations under Public Subnet

On NAT instance, edit the VNIC for to enable "Skip Source and Destination check"

Add one more Private IP Address 10.0.10.20  and Select NO Public IP

SSH to Public IP of NAT Instance

Login to the public server and upload your private ssh key to login to the private subnet server. Confirm whether you can SSH to private server from the public server

We need to configure this machine as a router. Create file to be used when enabling ip forwarding

vi /etc/sysctl.d/98-ip-forward.conf

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 

Save the file.

Run firewall commands to enable masquerading and port forwarding

firewall-offline-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 nat POSTROUTING 0 -o ens3 -j MASQUERADE

firewall-offline-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter FORWARD 0 -i ens3 -j ACCEPT

/bin/systemctl restart firewalld

sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/98-ip-forward.conf

Setting up NAT Address to all incoming traffic to NAT

This rule allows packets from the private subnet to route through the NAT instance (10.0.10.20)

Its the time to TEST

Login to your private server, see whether you can ping oracle.com or even curl/wget to oracle.com. Also you can see whether yum update works or not.

This means all the packets get routed to the NAT instance and from there it reaches to the internet gateway.

I am pretty much sure that you are thinking to automate this. No worries, we already have a Terraform scripts to automate the entire process. Want to know more, Click here

My first experience with JenkinsX

As a DevOps engineer, I thought JenkinsX is a CI/CD tool for containers to build in K8s environments. But it's wrong. JenkinsX is an attempt to automate the whole development process end to end for containerized applications based on Docker and Kubernetes. JenkinsX is an Open Source project and is not a fork of Jenkins. JenkinsX reuses Jenkins Core and it has set of additional tools to achieve its goal. It is easy to customize JenkinsX as we can edit or replace any of its tool sets.

JenkinsX address the following problems:

1. Frequent deployments
2. Low Mean Time to Recover
3. CI/CD
4. Configuration as Code
5. Automated Release Management

Once JenkinsX installed, it setup and configure the following for you:

1. Create a Git repo for a new application with development, staging and production environment.
2. Create a pipeline configuration in Jenkins for a new application and connect it with a Git repo
3. Automate the DevOps processes (like builds, artifacts and containers creation and deployments) based on Git operations (branching, commits, PR creating, PR merging)

Building Blocks of JenkinsX:

Strengths of Jenkins X:

1. It address the pain points and streamlining implementation of DevOps/GitOps principles. It saves a lot of time for new project implentations.
2. Concept of JenkisX is very strong.
3. Good toolset, which is already configured and works (k8s, Jenkins, Docker registry, Chartmuseum, Monokular, Nexus)
4. "JX Quickstarts" make a creation of new apps an easy ride
5. Ability to customise the pipelines and their templates
6. It provides a preview environment, which helps in decision making for pull requests.

Not that good points of Jenkins X:

1. Jenkins X is another framework to learn.
2. Still its a baby, a lot of things to implement and improve
3. Documentation lacks comprehensive, it has only basic information
4. Migration of existing CI/CD pipelines into Jenkins X is difficult
5. For each team, we need to deploy each JenkinsX instance

JenkinsX Flow: