Oracle Cloud Service by Timo Hahn – Part 1

DOAG DevCamp2016: Oracle Development Cloud Service Hands On by Timo Hahn (Part 1)

End of February the DOAG held its annual DevCamp in Bonn, Germany. One big part of the DevCamp was a session or better a couple of session about the Oracle Developer Cloud Service and how to use it.

This part shows some general information about the Oracle Cloud. In the next part we show how to migrate an existing application to the cloud and how to use some of the available tools of the Development cloud.

The Developer Cloud Service (DCS) was introduced last year and became available to the public around the OOW2015. It offers a whole toolset to allow development of applications in the cloud. The DCS is bundled with the Java Cloud Service (JCS) which is bundled with the Database Cloud Service (DBCS). There are a couple of other services like Storage Cloud Service , responsible for managing the disk storage needed, and Compute Cloud Service responsible for the security and firewall of all services used by a company. For more information see Fasten your seat belts: Flying the Oracle Development Cloud Service (1- Boarding).

All these services are working together. If you ever have setup a working Oracle environment consisting of a DB, a WebLogic Server, load balancer, ADF Runtime you know that this isn’t an easy task to accomplish. The good news is that this work is done automatically by Oracle provisioning the different services. You as a user or company have to make some decisions like which version of the DB you want to use, or which version of WebLogic Server to install and how many CPUs to use for each service. You can later upscale the number of CPUs or managed server you want to use in total for your system. All this is very flexible. For more information about this see LINK HINZUFÜGEN.

Why to use the DCS?

Well, as mentions before, setting up a development environment does take some time and hardware. Sometimes it hard to get the time from your admins to get the hardware and setup the software to get the full environment four your development. This is one reason I see at my customers for not upgrading to newer software versions. The department has to buy the hardware and software licenses, without knowing exactly which hardware parameters they later need. Once the evaluation is finished you have the hardware and software on stock without knowing if you really need them. After all it was an evaluation only.

Oracle Cloud Services (Platform as a Service or PaaS in short) allows you to buy or lease the needed hard and software to setup an evaluation stack. You can use the stack as long and you pay for it. You can up/down scale it to your needs. As a sample you can start with a small scale development environment (DB, WeblogicServer with one admin and one managed server) and later scale it up with a load balancer and multiple managed servers in a cluster.

Right now there are two different environments for development available to configure: 11g as JDev 11.1.1.7.0 and 12c as JDev 12.1.3. In a couple of weeks JDev 12.2.1 should be available too.

Depending on the size (RAM, storage or number of OCPUs) you can select ‘metered’ or ‘none metered’ services. For pricing information see https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/java?tabID=1385147650676 for a sample for the JCS.

Installation or configuration of the DCS is not part of this document. Oracle Developer Cloud Service smoothly and invisibly integrates your development environment with the latest versions of other services in Oracle Cloud, such as Oracle Java Cloud Service and Oracle Database Cloud Service.

Another big plus is the fully integrated development life cycle which allows to create and administer the configurations for code repositories, continuous integration, testing, building, and deployment for all stages of the development.

Developer Cloud Hands On

The remainder of this document talks about the practical work with the DCS. We show which tools are provided and how to use them to setup a CI (Continuous Integration) environment. As a test case we use the sample application provided by the Rapid Development Kit which shows a sample on how to easily develop modern, scalable applications using the Alta UI. The sample was developed by (NAMEN) to give developers a foundation to enhance the sample or use the code they like in their own application. The image below shows the landing page of the application with the splash screen. The running application can be seen at http://140.86.8.75/AppsCloudUIKit/faces/Welcome

The application comes with design guide as an e-book and hints on how to use and extend the sample. We start with downloading the source from the web page. The application was developed using JDev 11.1.1.9.0. In the DCS we use JDev version 12.1.3.

Before we start to use the DCS we copy the sources from the zip into a new empty directory. From this directory we start by first logging into the DCS and creating a new project, DevCamp16 in the image below.

The identity domain holds the service (multiple projects) and members who can access the DCS using different roles. Once we work with one of the project we can add members to the project, but first have to add them to the identity domain as users. For this document we are only using one administrator and multiple development users. The DCS administrator assigns new users to the DCS, the project administrator the members of the DCS to the project. A DCS member can be member in zero or many projects in different roles. This way one DCS can be used for different projects. Members of one project can be excluded from others. A member of the identity domain only sees projects he is a member of. This allows a fine grained project landscape.

The project is the development environment we or the team uses to develop an application. A project holds one or more GIT repositories to manage code, a Husdon build server to manage the builds of the software, an issue tracker (kind of Jira), a wiki which we user to document decisions we made during the development, a deployment section which we use to implement a CI environment and finally we get an agile board where we can plan the development (add issues, backlog and sprints).

The last tab we see is the ‘Administration’ tab which allows one or more members to act as the administrators of the project. An administrator can add other members to the project, manage their rights and even remove the project with all its artifacts. The UI is modern and build using JET with Alta UI Design. The image below shows the administration page of the project.

The image below shows the GIT (or more than one if we add more) and the one Maven repository.

In the next tab we get an overview about the project. This is more or less empty as there has not been much work done.

The final tab hold the information about the members of the project.

This concludes part 1. In part 2 we talk about how to migrate the application from the RDK to the DCS. We learn how to setup the build system and integrate with continuous integration service.