For an internal project I had the pleasure to setup a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment for an APEX development team. Here is a short overview about the setup.
Requirements
- VPN Access from everywhere – 2 people are working maximal at same time on the environment
- Oracle Standard Edition 2 – no license available in project
- Small monitoring to verify server stats
- Instances can be started and stopped from the developers to save costs for example over night, weekend, holiday etc.
Architecture Diagram
| Resource | Network | Usage | Remarks |
| Open VPN Access Server | Public Subnet | VPN client access and traffic routing | OCI Cloud Marketplace Image – OpenVPN Access Server (2 FREE VPN Connections) – OpenVPN Inc. – Oracle Cloud Marketplace |
| Management Server | Private Subnet | OCI-CLI, Monitoring | Application server and database node start/stop with OCI-CLI, Grafana and Prometheus for monitoring |
| Application Server | Private Subnet | Tomcat ORDS, APEX | – |
| Database System | Private Subnet | – | OCI Database Standard Edition 2, Backup to Object Store enabled |
Network Components
- Regional private and public subnet
- Security lists and network security groups
- Private and public routing table
- NAT gateway for regional private subnet
Monitoring
Grafana and Prometheus, running on the management server. The free shape VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro fits perfect for this small setup! The Prometheus node exporter runs on the database and the application server. I used this Grafana dashboard here: Prometheus Node Exporter Full dashboard for Grafana | Grafana Labs
Links
Next Steps
- Adding Influx DB for persistence
- Adding the Oracle database to Grafana monitoring
- Optimizing shape size for the database server according usage
Other Ideas
- Create a blueprint for internal developer environments
- Automate the setup with Terraform and Ansible
Summary
Setting up this infrastructure in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was fun. All developer requirements are fulfilled. Started with the Network and OpenVPN configuration – I really like their Marketplace instance – and the moved on to application and database server, step-by-step. There are many other ideas what we can do more based on this setup, the work will not run out. #ilike