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!