Why Automation Matters : It doesn’t get much simpler than this!

 

Just a little story about something that happened recently…

The July Oracle quarterly security patches dropped, along with the downstream OpenJDK releases a little later. As soon as the OpenJDK release dropped I updated all our non-production Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) middle tier to the latest and greatest. Production will follow shortly. I figured that was the end of it…

On Friday evening I noticed a post by Jeff Smith saying version 22.2.1 of SQLcl and ORDS had dropped. Now it was Friday evening, and I typically don’t work on Fridays, but I really didn’t want to have this hanging over me all weekend, so this is what I did…

  • Download the software.
  • Upload the software to Artifactory.
  • Change a couple of files in Git, specifying the new software versions.
  • Press a button in TeamCity to rebuild the ORDS Docker image and push the new image to JFrog Platform.
  • Press a button in TeamCity to redeploy all the non-production ORDS containers.

The whole process took a few minutes, and I was confident it would work because it’s all automated and works every time. I sent this message to Jeff.

I {expletive} love automation. I just noticed your post about 22.2.1 of SQLcl and ORDS. I logged on to work. Updated a couple of files in git and pressed a button in TeamCity. New ORDS Docker image built and pushed to all non-prod systems. Boom…

This is why automation matters. The combination of picking the right platform, in this case containers, and investing a little time in the automation means we can react really quickly to new releases. It doesn’t get much simpler than this!

Check out the rest of the series here.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. This post explains the application topology we use for ORDS and APEX.

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.