Author: Jeevan Gheevarghese Joseph, Adao Oliveira Junior and Mickey Boxell
Publisher: Oracle Press
Pages: 448
ISBN: 978-0137902538
Print:0137902530
Kindle: B0CLKZ8B8Y
Audience: Developers using Oracle Cloud
Rating: 4.5
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

Subtitled 'A guide to building cloud native applications', this book explores Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services and how they can be used to build cloud native applications.

The book starts from the beginnings with an introduction to the services and the terminology used, with definitions of realms, availablity domains, tenancies and compartments. The authors look at Cloud Guard and security zones, and show how to get started with a tenancy on OCI.

Chapter two moves more into specifics, with a look at the automation and management APIs, and how to work with Terraform. Terraform is an open source tool that can be used to programmatically manage infrastructure. Essentially, you can manage infrastructure with configuration files rather than through a graphical user interface. Having introduced Terraform, this chapter then looks at Oracle's Resource Manager Service.

Chapter three introduces the Cloud Native Services available on Oracle Cloud, starting the the Oracle Container Registry (OCR). This can be used to store, share, and manage container images such as Docker images. The authors look at the concepts of compute and container images, and the container engine for Kubernetes before moving on to the Service Mesh, a service that handles security, observability, and network traffic management on Oracle Cloud. This chapter also introduces serverless functions, API gateways, and introduces the Oracle Streaming Service.

The whole of the next chapter looks in more depth at the Container Engine for Kubernetes. This can be used to deploy Kubernetes clusters and provides a serverless Kubernetes service with virtual nodes and automatic scaling. The chapter has good sections setting out Kubernetes concepts, how to create a cluster, manage stoage, and handle security. The following chapter is again devoted to the container engine, this time covering topics such as upgrading the control and data planes, scaling a cluster, and cluster add-ons.

Security and securing your workloads and applications is the topic of the next chapter. Again, this is framed in terms of Kubernetes and the OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). There are sections on hardening containers and OKE worker nodes, securing workloads, and the tools you get that can help.

A chapter on serverless platforms and applications focuses mainly on serverless functions and the Service Mesh, and how to use Oracle's function as a service platform that is based on the open source FN Project engine. The authors then move on to look at observability, and the use of OCI monitoring and logging.

A chapter on the OCI DevOps service and deployment automation explains how it can be used for building and delivering software using managed Git repositories, building pipelines, and repositories for build artifacts and Docker images.

The book concludes with a chapter on bringing it all together with a sample application.

Overall, this is a clear introduction to what can seem a complex environment. There isn't much attempt to simplify topics or make them accessible with cheerful asides, tips and cartoons; this is very much an Oracle Press corporate plain vanilla textbook. However, the authors explain in clear terms what the different elements are and how they can be used, and if you need to get to grips with Oracle OCI, I can recommend this book.

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