In a previous post I show you how you can integrate DevOps automation and orchestration tools to provision Oracle databases by leveraging Enterprise Manager (EM) and the Cloud Management Pack (CMP). Once provisioned, databases need to be fully maintained in terms of monitoring but most precisely patching.
Patching databases decreases the risk of breach by timely mitigating vulnerabilities, but in can be a daunting task for organizations. Manual patching is time consuming and error prone. Home grown scripts are difficult to maintain and they increase maintenance cost. So the question is, how can I automate the patching process and even better, how can I integrate it with my current orchestration workflow?
Let me explain how you can achieve all this by making use of Oracle’s Database Lifecycle Management Pack (DBLM) and CMP. DBLM’s Fleet Maintenance help us patch and upgrade Oracle databases at scale with minimum downtime. It makes use of Gold Images and out-of-place patching in order to achieve this.
Fleet Maintenance Benefits
All this functionality can be integrated with CMP’s DBaaS in order to provide and end-to-end automation solution. DBaaS exposes REST APIs that we could then call using the automation tool of choice. Database Administrators, end users or 3rd party tools can then use these features to patch Oracle databases.
DBaaS Automation Diagram
Do you want to learn more about this and even be able to try it? We’ve created an Oracle LiveLabs that cover’s all this functionality. This lab will guide you through the request of a PDB, setup DBaaS configuration, setup Fleet Maintenance and finally patch the PDB.
Follow the link below for the Oracle LiveLabs workshop.
In this post I want to show you how Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c using the Cloud Management pack, can be easily integrated with DevOps automation and orchestration tools like Ansible in order to provision Oracle Databases.
These can be either single instance, multi-tenant container databases, pluggable databases, schemas or databases running on high availability clusters and Dataguard configurations. EM 13c implements pre-checks, best practices and processes to provision all these configurations in a secure, automated and controlled fashion.
We have created an step by step laboratory in the Oracle LiveLabs framework. This lab contains a demo environment and a workbook that guide through all the steps. This lab shows you how to provision a PDB using Ansible and Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c. It also shows you how to shutdown, start, resize and check the status of the PDB using Ansible.
With this kind of integration, enterprises can close the loop in terms of DevOps or CI/CD pipeline provisioning. They can provision the Virtual Machines, Application and Oracle Databases automatically.
Follow the link below for the Oracle LiveLabs demo.
DevOps adoption helps customers to automate and standardize processes, accelerate software delivery while keeping control of the operations, monitoring and lifecycle management of the environment. Enterprises select a tool or toolset in order to support desired business goals. However, these selected tools often require deeper automation from specialized management tools like Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c by making use of the Database Lifecycle Management and the Cloud Management packs, enables Database Administrators, Developers and DevOps teams to automate the monitoring and management of the Oracle Database. Some of the use cases inlclude:
Monitoring Setup Automation
Provision Oracle Databases
Database Lifecycle Automation
Automated Database Cloning
Metering and Chargeback
Mask Sensitive Data
DevOps Tools and Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c
Monitoring Setup Automation
Monitoring begins as soon as you deploy the Oracle Enterprise Manager agent to the target environment. There are several tasks performed by the administrator in order to achieve the desired level of monitoring for a particular target. Using DevOps orchestration tools combined with EM 13c, customers can automate the monitoring setup right after the OS environment is provisioned.
In a previous post I went through the details on how to deploy the EM Agent using Ansible.
DevOps orchestration tools like Ansible, Chef, Terraform, etc., can easily integrate with EM 13c in order to provision Oracle databases. These can be either single instance, multi-tenant container databases, pluggable databases, schemas or databases running on high availability clusters and Dataguard configurations. EM 13c implements pre-checks, best practices and processes to provision all these configurations in a secure, automated and controlled fashion.
Once provisioned, Oracle databases need to be well maintained and secured by regularly applying patches and eventually upgraded to a higher release. All these database lifecycle activity tasks can be automated by integrating EM 13c with orchestration DevOps tools. Oracle’s Database Lifecycle Management pack enables customers to streamline these tasks using their DevOps workflows.
Oracle EM 13c help to automate the process of cloning databases using different options as a source. Like RMAN backups, snapshots or live data. EM 13c Snap Clone simplifies the cloning process by creating space efficient clones. DevOps orchestration tools can make use of this functionality to provision fully functional copies of Oracle databases in minutes by cloning databases while keeping the storage needs to a minimum.
Metering and Chargeback
DevOps tools automate the delivery of Oracle databases, however the lack of accurate costing of usage may result in no knowledge of consumption trends affecting the ability to measure the business value of IT investments. EM 13c Chargeback tools can be enabled so resource usage and allocation of databases provisioned in conjunction with DevOps tools is properly tracked and presented through comprehensive reports to business units. Chargeback enables consumers to adjust their IT consumption and utilization rates, hence driving consumer accountability.
Data Masking
DevOps teams often require databases to be provisioned with data cloned from production sources or asking for continuous refresh from these sources. Database and security organizations are required to limit exposure of sensitive information while delivering database environments. EM 13c enables administrators to provide to DevOps teams an automated and secure method that is easily integrated with orchestration tools. Data masking works on sensitive data by replacing it with realistic but scrubbed data based on masking rules.
I will cover more step by step examples of these use cases in future posts.
