Fasten your seat belts: Flying the Oracle Development Cloud Service (2 – Safety)

In this second part of the series we take a look at the safety features on board of our aircraft, named Oracle Developer Could Service.
As in a real aircraft we don’t see all safety features available, as some are hard to show without blacking most of the screen. We cover how the Developer Cloud looks for a new member of a project. Remember that a project in the cloud is not the same as a project in JDeveloper. For more info on this refer to Part 1 – Boarding.

We start with an administrative task of creating a new member for our Identity Domain in the Oracle Developer Cloud Service. This is necessary as only members to the Identity Domain can be members of a project in the Developer Cloud. The Identity Domain is the sandbox which holds all available (or licensed) cloud services. In our installation it contains the services we saw in the first part of the series.

Logged in as an administrator of the identity domain we can add a new user

Add a new member

Clicking on one of the marked links will open a couple of dialogs to fill in the new users data

Select role of new member

New member added

In the first image we fill in the basic user data like name and e-mail address and the roles the user is assigned to. The e-mail address is significant as the new member gets a nice mail with credentials he/she must use to verify the e-mail address and finish the account building by changing the initial system assigned password.
The possible roles a user can be assigned to can be seen on the left. We only assign the new member the ‘Java Developer’ the role ‘Developers Service User Role’. This is sufficient to work with the Oracle Developer Cloud Service as part of a development team. The other roles allow a user access more administrative tasks and the other parts of the Oracle Development Cloud Service (DB, storage…).
Once the dialog is filled out an e-mail is send to the new member as well as to the manager of the user if this field is filled.

New member e-mail

When the new member follows the link in the e-mail and logs in the first time he has to change her/his password. This isn’t just changing the password but you also have to answer three questions which are used if you forget you password and need to reset it later. You should note down the answers carefully! The next step is to configure the user interface language and timezone.

First Login

Change initial password

Select UI language

Dashboard of available services

Finally you get transferred to the landing page showing all available services from all identity domains the e-mail address is or was registered to.
As I used the e-mail address before to get a trial account the landing page shows multiple identity domains. The one we are using in this post is marked with a red border. You can user the drop down to select to only show one identity domain which makes it less confusing.

Landing page with selected identity domain

New members Project landing page

Clicking on the Oracle Developer Cloud Service you are transferred to the ‘Welcome Page’ (last image of the gallery). At the moment you can only create a new project, but don’t see any available project. The reason for this is that the new member is not attached to an existing project. This has to be done by an ‘owner’ of the project. Only after this a member can access the project.
To add the new member to an existing project, we log into the Oracle Development Could Service as an owner of the project and add the new member to the project.

Administrator adds new member

The next time the user updates the ‘Welcome Page’ or logs in again he’ll see the project.

Administrator adds new member

Select member from list

Clicking on the project shows the project’s home page with the project’s timeline and information about the git and maven repositories.

Project’s landing page

Now the new member can access the git repository information by clicking the menu button

Copy git repository address

With this information the member can clone the repository using JDeveloper 12.1.3

Clone from Git 1

Clone from Git 2

Clone from Git 3

Clone from Git 4

Clone from Git 5

The member can now work locally with the project and make changes needed or assigned to him/her.

This concludes the 2nd part about safety and setting up members in the Oracle Developer Cloud Service.

In the next part we will introduce how to work with projects and how to setup projects for continuous integration (CI).

Fasten your seat belts: Flying the Oracle Development Cloud Service (1- Boarding)

I’ll begin new a series about my findings on working with the Oracle Development Cloud Service. I’m not sure how many post will finally be part of this series, but I guess you’ll see a couple. Before we begin lets ask the big question:

What is the Oracle Oracle Development Cloud Service and what do you get from it?
The Oracle Development Could Service is one of the offerings around a whole bunch of other cloud services Oracle put out lately. It is one of the ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) offerings

Platform as a Service – Overview

which consists of a ready to use Weblogic Server, a ready to use CI Server (Hudson), a source code repository (Git, Ant, Maven), issue tracking, wiki and a ready to use Oracle DB. All this services can be provisioned in two different versions 11g (11.1.1.7.0) and 12c (12.1.3). All components or services are configured and ready to use, even the right ADF Runtime is installed on hte Weblogic Server.
In summary you get a development environment for the enterprise. No need to download tons of software, searching for the versions which play well together. No time consuming installation of the software (I most often need multiple tries until I get what I think works best for myself). So you save a lot of time you normally need to get up and running.

You should download the small E-Book available from the Developers Cloud Service landing page which gives a more comprehensive overview.
All this you get with a nice and fancy Web-UI which looks like Alta but seems to be Skyros. Sometimes it’s a bit confusing where the services can be reached from (which button or icon), but I guess with more experience this won’t be an issue.

Boarding
From the homepage of the cloud services

Oracle Cloud Home Page

you can sign into different parts of the cloud:

Sign In – Oracle Cloud

The first thing is to select the right data center, as not all data centers available know which services you are allowed to use. In my case I use the ‘Public Cloud Service – NA’ to get to the login screen

Sign In – Oracle Cloud – Select Data Center

Sign In – Oracle Cloud – Data Center

Finally we see the dashboard with all available services

My Services – Dashboard

We see all the services which are working in the background to build the developer cloud. There is the Database Backup Service, the Database Service, the Compute Service, the Storage Service and the Java Service.
The Compute Cloud Service provides elastic compute capacity and allows to flexibly configure capabilities for the virtual machine running your services. It allows to configure security, ssh key management, block storage and network configuration for the Database Cloud Service and the Java Cloud Service. Finally it provides monitoring capabilities for the instances.

Compute Cloud Service – Overview

The Java Cloud Service holds the servers (admin and managed servers) as well as a Coherence server and a Load Balancer

Detailed View to Java Cloud Service Nodes

It allows to get to the underlying configurations web applications like Weblogic Admin Console or Enterprise Manager

Java Could Service Overview

The central part of this blog however is the Developer Cloud Service

Developer Cloud Service – Overview

A click on the button to open the service console will bring up the Welcome Page of the Developer Cloud Service where you see all projects you have access to. You can also create a new project.

Welcome to Oracle Developer Cloud Service!

The term project is a bit misleading for developers with a background in JDeveloper. A project in the developer cloud holds one or more Git repositories, a maven repository, an issue tracker, a wiki and the Continuous Integration (CI) part as build and deployment. In the next parts of the series we’ll see more.

Cloud Project Overview

The build part can be either done using Ant or Maven. The administration part allows to change various parameters of the project. The small button marked with the red arrow allows to manage the users or team members working with this project.

This concludes the boarding of the plane we fly over the Developer Cloud Service. Stay tuned for the next part!