If you’re relying on the Biemond orawls and oradb puppet modules for managing Oracle and WebLogic in your Puppet environment, there are some pressing issues you need to be aware of. These modules, once popular on Puppet Forge, are on the brink of expiration. They haven’t been updated in over four years, and their GitHub repositories have been eerily quiet for just as long. Even worse, pull requests are gathering dust, unmerged, with no signs of life from the maintainers. But here’s the truth: Puppet for Oracle and WebLogic is still very much alive and kicking.

For a long time, already Enterprise Modules provided the ora_secured module. A Puppet module that allowed you to ensure that your database is compliant with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark. But this module was original designed for use with Oracle 12c in in the mean time we have Oracle 19c. We now have multiple versions of Oracle and numerous versions of the CIS benchmarks for Oracle. Thus, time to review our current design and provide you with a new and enhanced module.

Ok, so you have set up your database servers using our Oracle modules and can apply changes to them consistently and controlled. You even support the development teams by enabling them to spin up their own Oracle database using vagrant and VirtualBox. Everything seems to be under control. Is it really….? It’s January 15th, and Oracle just released its quarterly Critical Patch Update for January 2020. You should really apply this because it’s been a while since you last patched your Oracle software. The security department found out it contains a patch that is critical for the security of your business application. So they are pushing you to patch fast. Oh, and by the way, business urges you to keep downtime to a minimum because downtime costs an increasing amount of money and extra calls to the helpdesk.

The Oracle Cloud or OCI is an extensive Cloud offering by Oracle. The possibilities are enormous. In part 1 we started exploring The Oracle cloud with Puppet. The first steps where installing the modules and making sure th authentication is set up correctly. Now we are going to continue on our journey and are inspecting and creating a network setup and an initial VM.

The Oracle Cloud or OCI is an extensive Cloud offering by Oracle. The possibilities are enormous. The Oracle Cloud provides you with a Web interface so you can create and manage cloud infrastructure. You can also you Terraform to automate the creation and destruction of Oracle cloud resources. Recently we have also added Puppet to the list of tools you can use to create and manage Oracle Cloud resources. This blog post we will use the new oci_config module to create and inspect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.