Is your institution moving to the cloud? Are you adopting a cloud strategy, such as Cloud First, where the institution takes the plunge and jumps in with both feet, or perhaps an Opportunistic Cloud or Experimental Cloud strategy where they test the waters with select projects? Perhaps your institution has instead elected to stay out of the cloud entirely and to simply watch from a distance. Each of these strategies can be appropriate in the right context, but adopting a cloud strategy that works for your institution should be a priority. With any of these strategies, you need to ensure … Read More
Does the SYS user really become inaccessible in Oracle Database running on Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
I had heard from a fellow DBA colleague that a known problem with Oracle Databases on AWS was that, in certain cases, the SYS user was not available to the DBA. Curious (and slightly alarmed), I did a little research online and discovered more than a few forum posts asking what to do about the apparent inability to execute common DBA tasks as SYS running Oracle Database on AWS. DBAs who were accustomed to being able to run DBMS_CRYPTO or install APEX from the command line were wondering how to get their work done in the cloud. In response, AWS had … Read More
AWS Standard Play Workshop at Bridgewater College
Bridgewater College took their first step to AWS by taking part in a new AWS program named, Standard Play. In 2018, AWS created the Standard Play program that provides a variety of workshops to help higher education customers take their first steps into the AWS Cloud. Bridgewater, in need of modernizing their website infrastructure, decided to focus on its main public-facing website for the pilot of the technology. As the AWS partner leading the Standard Play, M&S Consulting conducted a multi-day workshop to pilot the migration of Bridgewater’s website to AWS. M&S utilized infrastructure as code principals through CloudFormation to … Read More
Building Dapps with Blockchain and Salesforce
Salesforce is the most popular and widely used CRM solution in the cloud, it has helped numerous companies automate their sales, marketing, and customer service processes to increase efficiency and productivity. Blockchain technology is a revolutionary breakthrough which promises to fill a lot of gaps in security and trust with the current supply chain, customer service, and financial systems space (to name a few). Combining these two technologies together will be a perfect marriage of an incredible end-user facing application which offers numerous options for ease of use across multiple consumption platforms, with a system of records that is impossible to … Read More
Lambda Functions with Newer Version of boto3 than Available by Default
During development of an AWS Lambda function utilizing the recently released AWS Cost Explorer API, the latest version of boto3 and botocore was discovered to be unavailable in the Lambda execution environment. The Lambda execution environment supported version of an AWS SDK can lag behind the latest release found on GitHub, which can cause supportability issues when writing Lambda code attempting to use the most recently added features of AWS SDKs. This blog post will explore using boto3 1.4.8 and botocore 1.8.0 despite (at the time of this writing) the Lambda execution environment defaulting to boto3 1.4.7 and botocore 1.7.37. This … Read More
VMware hosted on AWS?
Some exciting news came out of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware last year with the announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware has been the bedrock of enterprise virtualization and the leading software-as-a-datacenter for years. AWS presented the world with a new way to think about datacenters and quickly became a leader in cloud computing. A limiting factor in using AWS was the vast differences in how AWS and VMware worked to accomplish similar tasks. You will find the same buzz words, such as snapshots, but not the same actions from them. This has presented the industry with a … Read More
Oracle Cloud DevOps and Cloud Native Applications
Ever heard of DevOps? Well, if you’ve been in the hip scene of agile development then you might have heard this term. Development Operations is a consolidated platform of tools that are meant to promote communication between developers and IT operations while giving the ability to provide a quick development response in the form of continuous delivery. Those who have adopted the agile methodology have seen the benefits of quick delivery with the ability to adjust to rapidly changing business requirements. Oracle is trying to build on top of that type of methodology and consolidate the tools surrounding it with … Read More