Architecture, Development and Training
I will hack a WebLogic password live at DOAG 2012 conference 
… and explain 9 more things you should know about WLS12c. Mostly stuff out of my WebLogic Advanced Recipe book.
There will also be some chocolate and a book to win!
My WebLogic 12c talk on Tuesday.
Don’t miss my cloud talk! I will demonstrate live a couple of things you won’t be able to with the Oracle cloud Public Cloud talk on Wednesday. More chocolate and of course another book to win!
Amazon Web Services improved its Relational Database as a Service (RDS) for Oracle. It now supports APEX (finally, see the lengthy APEX discussion here), the OracleXMLDB and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
For more information:
You can now have EBS optimized EC2 instances with e.g. 500 or 1000 Mbit/sec throughput to EBS.
According to AWS a standard EBS volume will cope with 100 IOPS on average allowing some burts. As I mentioned before there was plenty of complaints and discussion about EBS performance workarounds though. Here is the news: AWS is offering provisioned IOPS EBS volumes. You can create up to 20 TB of provisioned IOPS volumes with a total of 10,000 IOPS per AWS account (but apply to extend your AWS account for more).
Seems like a lovely idea for a db data file, doesn’t it?
Does that make you run your EBS I/O benchmark again? Let me know about the results!
I am just back from a successful, long and intensive trip to Australia. If you are waiting for a reply to an email there is a good chance you will get it soon now.
I delivered an Amazon and Oracle public cloud workshop series on behalf of AUSOUG, based on my cloud computing book: 6 cities, 6 workshops of 4 h each, almost 200 attendees, hands-on, live development in the cloud (WebLogic with 61 GB heap deployed live on 3 continents, cloud storage, auto scaling, transformation of a classical Java EE app in the cloud), 16 flights (including a 1 week trip to the outback, flying 2,5 h north of Perth and driving 2200 km for shooting the cover image for my upcoming WebLogic 12c: Advanced Recipes book).
Check out the flattering reviews for the event.
thanks to everybody who attended!
Since today Oracle EM is available with the Relational Database Service in Amazon Web Services.
RDS instances come with a free trial for 60 days and there is no additional cost for OEM.
I recommend to read my Cloud Databases whitepaper to get started, follow the discussion of Oracle DB instances in this previous posting and give it a try yourself.
Here is a screencast that explains how to create an Oracle DB instance in AWS, how to enable OEM (just in case you are an admin) and how to connect to your cloud instance with a local installation of NetBeans (in case you are a developer).
This year I really kept the best until the end! Last week I was running a 2-day cloud computing workshop with a 2-hour hands-on management presentation the night before the workshop for Contribute in Belgium. Contribute is an Oracle Platinum partner and being surrounded by Oracle Fusion Middleware experts, DBAs, application architects and senior level management the technical level of the workshop was very high with many interesting discussions.
We covered Oracle Public Cloud (OPC), Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace (RS). OPC is not available yet, but the overall functionality including its limitations for the first release is more or less known and quite interesting compared to let’s say running WebLogic on AWS.
To prove the point I was running WebLogic 12c on AWS cloud with 30GB of heap on a high-mem 4xl instance with 8 cores. Proving the point cost me a bit more than US$2.
Typically I expected that the more tech savvy audience prefers AWS over Rackspace, yet this time people were impressed by the easy setup of Rackspace and the way they handled a minor problem with their web console file-upload feature during a live chat session.
Among hundreds of other details we looked at the I/O performance. The performance of Amazon’s EBS is known to be interesting (you may want to read this as ‘difficult’). See Adrian’s posting for a thorough explanation, some benchmarks here, and some more details there.
The out-of-the-box performance looking at Rackspace Cloud is more consistent and there is a surprisingly high throughput which is almost independent of the data size. Here is some data comparing a local laptop disk, to the disks attached to the Rackspace Cloud servers to my brand new consumer SSD (not sure if a 512 GB SSD still qualifies as ‘consumer’). All numbers refer to a READ-benchmark with increasing data size.
Laptop HD (500GB SATA): 80 MB/s
Laptop SSD (Crucial m4): 281 MB/s
Rackspace (SAN): 302 MB/s
I am only posting the screenshot for one of the Rackspace I/O measurements since quality isn’t perfect. There is some older data with graphs available in a previous post of mine.
Now I am still curious about the dip on the left part of the graph which is consistent over several instances and measurements. Any comments?
Last week I received the Oracle Technologist of the Year Award, Cloud Architect.
It makes me feel flattered and it’s of course a great honor for me being on this list of fame together with companies such as Dell, TurkCell and others! The award is part of Oracle’s Excellence Awards program. The winners were selected by a panel of judges that scored each entry across multiple categories.
I know there was a tremendous amount of support for the nomination of my Oracle Middleware and Cloud Computing book by my customers, workshop participants, individual book reviewers, Oracle user groups, middleware experts and even some people at Oracle HQ – many thanks to all of you!
Read the full story in the Oracle Magazine:
This is just a note to myself. The command adds user oracle to the vboxsf group. Don’t even try chmod or chown, it won’t help. Replace oracle with your own uid.
sudo usermod -a -G vboxsf oracle
I am at S.F. at the Oracle Open World conference right now where Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Public Cloud in an entertaining and rather fun presentation just an hour ago. To see some more photos of the event and my paparazzi shot of Sting who already showed up for some 30 seconds: check out the Facebook site of my Oracle Cloud Computing book.
Larry picked up many ideas that I published earlier this year in my cloud computing book:
He was talking a lot about migrating from one cloud to another (mostly using AWS as an example, so they seem to be on the friend list). Also he emphasized that simple multi-tenant SaaS offers such as Salesforce.com with a shared DB are not real clouds and risky (because of the shared DB 
).
When Oracle’s position about clouds was rather fluffy (should I say cloudy?) even one year ago, I now hear them talking more about elasticity, self-service, chargeback etc.
What I didn’t like: So far this does not include pay-per use yet (one of my 4 criteria of cloud computing). Larry mentioned a monthly subscription during his keynote which was confirmed in the Thu morning keynote. Yet Oracle Enterprise Manger 12c is announced to provide metering at various levels.
I will post an update here as soon as there will be more details out tomorrow.
Apart from announcing the Oracle Public Cloud also Oracle Social Media (a part of Fusion Applications) was announced. See fotos on Facebook.
I yesterday gave a presentation at InSync2011 about Oracle’s cloud computing strategy, AWS cloud services and it’s current limitations. Amazon reacted quickly and updated their offering. We have been waiting for that. Keep going!
I always recommend to create your own EBS-based AMIs (e.g. for running complex software such as Oracle Fusion Middleware). This hold true for the classic AMIs as well as for the converted Oracle VM templates. Never rely on the existence of AMIs provided by Oracle because:
- Oracle can change or update (or remove) them any time.
- They often don’t exist for certain AWS regions, they are S3-based or only exist based on 32-bit OEL instead of 64-bit.
- Also, the AMIs provided often don’t exist for a specific version of Oracle products.
So always create your own copy! Yet here is something to consider:
AWS broke an EBS-based AMI of mine by deleting arbitrary block in the image. This is particularly annoying since there is no easy way to create an offline copy an EBS-based AMI. You could rsync the running image to local computer but there is absolutely no support to get this done in a user-friendly way from the AWS console.
The good: They informed me in time (being in Sydney if something happens in the EU regions gives you an advantage) and sent an apology. They also replaced the deleted blocks with empty blocks.
The bad: It cost me several days to create this AMI which was an OEL EBS-based, full-blown installation of Oracle SOA Suite 11.1.1.5 (I still have to check if it will be usable after a file system check).
For a more detailed explanation of what happened take a look at Amazon’s summary of the events. It summarizes to an error in the EBS software that was overlayed with a power outage in Dublin.
Hello Amazon: Why don’t you provide an easy way to have an offline backup of EBS-based AMIs for disaster recovery?An interesting question popped up on my Oracle Middleware and Cloud Computing book site which I like to answer here for the benefits of all the others puzzling at similar integration questions. In the context of using JMS as an integration technology I’d like to summarize the usage scenarios for Oracle WebLogic JMS Store-and-Forward and JMS-bridges (both are included in WebLogic server).
Hi Frank – [ ...] We have a requirement to build 2-way asynchronous integration between an application running on WLS in AWS and a legacy J2EE app running on IBM WebSphere in our Data Centre. From your excepts my understanding is that SQS is intended for use only between AWS apps – is this correct ? I think we need to be looking at a full JMS solution for our integration – perhaps using WLS JMS Store-And-Forward – Thanks, Peter D
Hi Peter,
Based on your comment I cannot go into great detail or even provide a solid architecture that anwsers you question (one that will save you from more reading) but here are some important points to consider:
- Amazon’s SQS is not restricted to be only used from AWS instances. SQS is purely based on web services (or language bindings that encapsulate those WS calls) so you can use it from any computer. E.g. you can read or write to SQS queues from remote.
- WLS Store-and-Forward (SAF) can only couple WLS instances of the same version and does not bridge to other JMS providers. You cannot use SAF to transfer from WLS JMS to IBM MQSeries (or whatever Websphere might use). JMS is a pretty bad integration technology which requires to have the right messaging classes in your classpath. E.g. when writing messages from Websphere to a WebLogic JMS queue you are required to have the WLS JMS classes in Websphere classpath.
- You can use the WebLogic’s JMS bridge to solve the somehow messy classpath issues. WLS JMS bridge has to be deployed as JCA adapter (still the jar file from the other provider is required but it is not used in custom code). The bridge will automatically forward from e.g. WLS JMS to MQSeries and even supports transcations. However there is no support to bridge between WLS JMS and AWS SQS.
- Unlike let’s say Oracle Service Bus, if you are looking at Apache Camel there is support to convert incoming JMS messages to outgoing SQS. Note to Oracle’s product manager of OSB: we would appreciate to have SQS as a supported transport protocol or possibly as an SOA Suite JCA adapter. Thanks for considering it
regards,
Frank
When designing your cloud architecture sooner or later the question about the database will arise. Today Amazon Web Services announced the availability of Oracle database instances provisioned with the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS). However, there are many other options available, and in order to make an informed decision as to which will best suit your architecture, you should know the pros and cons of at least four:
I summarized my view in a detailed 12 page whitepaper (the weather here is too nice and I can’t bother myself putting all the screen shots into this blog posting).
The PDF describes all the details of RDS and compares them to the other options available. Also learn how to use WebLogic with RDS:
Cloud Databases and Oracle Whitepaper.
UPDATE: As of Aug/2012 there is support for APEX, Oracle XML DB and VPC now!
If you like to know more after reading the whitepaper have a look at my Oracle Cloud Computing book at Amazon and join the book’s Facebook site!
AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a publish/subscribe service for notifications in the cloud. The scope of SNS is much broader than that of monitoring and it’s a good starting point used in combination with the CloudWatch to implement custom monitoring and notification. To use SNS, create a topic with the AWS management console or the SNS API. Clients interested in this topic subscribe to it, and whenever a notification is published to the topic, SNS will push it to all subscribers.
SNS supports a variety of transport protocols for the subscriptions:
Different subscribers can subscribe to a single topic using any of the listed transport protocols.
Topic names must be unique within an AWS account and their length is limited to 256 alphanumeric characters and hyphens. Within the AWS infrastructure there is no single point of failure for SNS: messages are stored redundantly across multiple availability zones. SNS attempts to deliver the notifications in order, however, due to network issues this cannot be guaranteed. The maximum message size is 8KB.
| Examples for using SNS |
SNS is an attractive cloud service that delivers all the functionality necessary to develop a monitoring solution similar to the notifications of WebLogic Diagnostic Framework. Unfortunately, the AWS management console doesn’t integrate SNS with CloudWatch yet. You have to use the CloudWatch command-line (or write your own code) to trigger an SNS notification if a CloudWatch metric is above a configured threshold.
SNS is more general and can be used for tasks other than sending notifications based on monitoring data. Thanks to the email transport protocol for subscriptions it is rather easy to build your own newsletter system based on SNS. Would you feel more relaxed if you knew that you would receive an email if your AWS fee has exceeded a certain amount? You can easily implement a process that retrieves your account usage and then triggers an SNS notification to an email subscriber if things get too expensive.
In general, you should regard SNS as a generic notification service that can be used by all kinds of applications in the AWS cloud so the applications can interact with each other.
| Best effort |
Protocols such as email or HTTP are inherently unreliable, and there is no retry count for notifications that SNS couldn’t push to the subscriber. The notification delivery semantics of SNS is best-effort: There is no guarantee that your notification will ever be delivered. Don’t use SNS to build systems where the delivery of notifications is essential.
SNS is integrated with the AWS management console, but usually you won’t be using SNS from the console, but from your applications or within custom tools.
There are SNS software development kits for Java, .NET, and PHP available for downloading at the following Amazon site:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=314
SNS is also supported by the popular open source library Typica. For an example about how easy it is to SNS with Typica have a look at the following Java class:
http://typica.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/test/java/TestSNS.java
Simple Notification Service and Simple Queue Service are both messaging systems. SQS implements a one to one message pattern with at least once semantics and polling for the receivers. In contrast to SQS, SNS sends a notification to many receivers with best effort semantics for the message delivery. SQS is not integrated into the AWS management console. In contrast to SNS, where messages get lost if the receiver is not available, you can use SQS to decouple systems because the messages are stored persistently until they are retrieved.
Table 12: SNS with SQS Comparison
| SNS | SQS | |
| Message pattern | 1 to many | 1 to one |
| Purpose | Notifications | Reliable Messaging |
| Message semantics | Best effort | At least once |
| Similar to | JMS topics | JMS queues |
| Message delivery | Pushed to receiver | Receiver poll |
| Maximum message | 8 KB | 64 KB |
You can forward an SNS notification to an SQS queue. The publish method of SNS is synchronous, meaning that it only returns after the notification is pushed to the subscriber -which in this case means the message is stored in the SQS queue. Once the notification is placed in the queue you will benefit from the at-least once delivery semantics of SQS.
SQS is only used programmatically. To create an SQS subscription you have to subscribe to the SQS queue with the Amazon resource name of the queue. In addition, you have to set the access control policy of the queue to allow SNS to send notifications to the queue.
Did you ever wonder about how to bridge information from AWS to OFM? Connecting Oracle Service Bus with SNS directly, is possible with HTTP, or can be done indirectly over email. For a direct connection, create an OSB proxy service with the transport protocol HTTP, and register it as an SNS subscriber.
There is a free usage tier for 100,000 SNS requests, 100,000 SNS HTTP(S) notifications, and 1000 email notifications.
Beyond the free tier Amazon will charge you for the API requests and notifications.
Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Book
Oracle Middleware and Cloud Computing Book