SUPERSEDED. First presented in November 2018 at DOAG 2018 conference, then in December at UKOUG Tech18 - slides have been updated slightly so see: https://www.slideshare.net/Veriton/platform-provisioning-automation-for-oracle-cloud

1. Terraform Meet Oracle Cloud:
Platform Provisioning Automation
Nikitas Xenakis, Co-op
Simon Haslam, eProseed

2. About Us
Nikitas Xenakis
Platform Specialist / Architect, The Co-op
• 17+ years as Enterprise DBA (v7-12cR2/19c)
• CAB/Beta Member: Oracle Database, Oracle
RAC, Data Integration (Goldengate)
• Global Leaders Transaction Processing

3. Copyright © 2018, eProseed and its affiliates. All rights reserved.
ABOUT ME
Simon Haslam
• Platform / Infrastructure
Architect
• Focus includes HA, DR,
security, automation
Relevant to this session
• Building SOA & DB CS since
May 2016, inc Corente.
• 3rd year presenting “how to
connect on-prem to cloud”
• Designed & built SOA CS
integration platform for
global use since Oct 2017, inc
VPNaaS
• On team migrating eProseed
Lux data centres to OCI@simon_haslam

4. Agenda
• Introduction
• Business Context, Technology Drivers
• Challenges, Direction
• Modern Platform Architecture
• Infrastructure and Platform as Code (IaC, PaC)
• Terraform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
• Demo
• Summary
5

5. Co-op HQ, Manchester UK - One of the most sustainable large buildings in the world
▪ Annual Revenue: £9.5B
▪ 2800+ Owned Stores
▪ Retail, Wholesale, Franchise,
Ecommerce
▪ 14 Distribution Centres
▪ Logistics Network servicing
7500+ Stores
Leading UK Convenience Retailer

6. Business & Technology Drivers
Business Context
• Technology as an enabler and transformer for business growth
• Acquisitions increasing diversity of technology landscape
• Modern Business demands High-Velocity in delivery
• Fuel for Growth, efficiencies re-invested to the business
• New Markets/Channels: Retail, Wholesale, Franchising, E-commerce
• Zero lost productive hours from preventable issues, protect service
Technology Drivers
• Simplification and standardisation of Database & Middleware platforms
• Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration (CI/CD)
• Strategic alignment of technology to business strategy, Cloud capability
• Exiting Data Centres where appropriate
7

7. Business & IT Context
Co-op
Stores
Distribution
Centres
Independent
Co-op Stores
Co-op
Data Centre
B
Support
Centre
Co-op
Data Centre
A
Cloud
2800 2500
141
70,000 colleagues
4000 users
8
6,100,000 members
CSG
Stores
2200

8. Challenges and Direction

9. On-Prem Platforms
10
On-Premises Platforms are architected and implemented in a Waterfall
manner (Design, Cost, Procure, Deploy, Configure)
• Pros
• Established
• Fit for Purpose for Waterfall
• Predictable (Cost, Performance)
• Cons
• Slow to provision from Design to Delivery
• Diverse, Complex
• Limitations in Capacity Automation, Elasticity, Capacity On Demand

10. Modern Business Demands
11
Modern business expectations and demands:
• Agility
• Technology not hindering
• High-Velocity
• Ability to grow into new markets
• Security (By Design) as high-priority
• Cost Sensitive
• Scalability, Capacity on Demand

11. Modern Platforms Architecture

12. Next Generation of (Cloud) Platforms
13
Modern Platforms should be architected and engineered based on
Infrastructure & Platform as Code (IaC, PaC) with the following in
mind:
• Simple
• Repeatable
• Scalable, Elastic
• Secure
• Self-Healing
• Versionable

13. Cloud Platforms
14
Gen -1 Cloud Platforms are provisioned in a variety of ways
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) – Cloud Portal
• Azure – Azure Portal, ARM
• AWS – AWS Portal, CloudFormation

14. Infrastructure & Platform As Code (IaC, PaC)

15. Infrastructure, Platform As Code (IaC, PaC)
16
• The process and ability to define,
provision and manage IaaS, PaaS
resources and services in a declarative
manner using a declarative language
rather than physical hardware
installation, configuration

16. Infrastructure, Platform As Code (IaC - PaC)
17
• The key pattern is to use IaC and PaC for
creating platforms that are highly automated,
Self-healing through automation in a
declarative way
• Automation supports DevOps and
Continuous Delivery and Continuous
Integration (CI/CD)

17. Infrastructure As Code (IaC)
18
• Terraform
• Open Source Tool (written in Go) by Hashicorp
• Multi Cloud incl. OCI
• 80+ Providers including OCI
• Other Declarative Languages/Tools
• CloudFormation, ARM
• Oracle Stack Manager
• Puppet

18. Terraform Available Platforms
19

19. How Co-op use IaC & Terraform today
20
In reality any enterprise will have a multi-cloud deployment footprint
• Co-op use Terraform to define/build a Retail Digital Platform in Azure
• Digital Management Layer (mostly Open Source Technologies)
• CI/CD Pipeline
• Platform is Hosting Responsive (Microservices based) Apps accessible to
Colleagues Own Devices
Terraform’s declarative nature and syntax allows the same patterns to be
deployed on OCI with re-factoring changes for specific APIs

20. Terraform - Co-op Best Practices
21
• Terraform Deployment Approach
• TF binaries co-located with Jenkins VM
• TF source code stored in Gitlab
• Platform Engineers use Git Client over SSH to develop/commit source
• QA Application environments re-built daily for regression and validation
• Avoid using TF on Laptop
• TF definition enough to re-build Platform in different Region (HA/DR)
• Gitlab and TF are key for Platform Re-build

21. Terraform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

22. Copyright © 2018, eProseed and its affiliates. All rights reserved.
OCI CONCEPTS
• Compartments
• Compute Instances
• Virtual Cloud Networks
• Gateways (Internet Gateway & Dynamic Routing Gateway)
23

23. Copyright © 2018, eProseed and its affiliates. All rights reserved.
BIG PICTURE EXAMPLE
24
DRG
Dynamic
Routing
Gateway
On-prem
Another
VCN
Another
cloud
admin

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TERRAFORM CONCEPTS
“Terraform is tool for building, changing, and
versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently”
• Resources: the artefacts that terraform manages
• Execution plan: what Terraform will do to turn the
infrastructure in its current form to the desired state
• Apply: what you do to tell Terraform to change to the
desired state
• Resource graph: the plan Terraform uses to make the
changes to resources, parallelising as much a possible
25
Cloud-agnostic

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TERRAFORM PROVIDERS
• Modules which tell Terraform how to build or change resources
• Supplied by Hashicorp, resource provider (like Oracle) or 3rd party/community
26

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MORE ABOUT PROVIDERS
• Providers are either:
– Integrated: downloaded by Terraform when needed
– Non-integrated: install from 3rd party or write your own
• 3 Oracle-developed providers:
– https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/oci/index.html OCI
https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-oci
– https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/oraclepaas/index.html Oracle Cloud Platform (Oracle PaaS)
provider is used to interact with resources supported by the Oracle Cloud Platform services. Talks to
the PaaS REST APIs
– https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/opc/index.html Oracle Public Cloud = Classic
27
Oracle providers are all
now integrated

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GETTING STARTED
• You need a host to run Terraform from
– could be your PC, a cloud instance, or build server
• Oracle Linux 7 example:
sudo yum install -y terraform
• Create/reuse .tf config files & set up .tfvars for your account/env
• The .tf files need to have one or more providers
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terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply
…terraform destroy

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DEMO

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ORACLE EXAMPLES
• https://github.com/oracle/terraform-examples
Starting point for some cases – reasonable activity (91 commits)
• https://oracle.rainfocus.com/widget/oracle/oow18/catalogoow18?search=HOL6376
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Terraform as a
Service…?

30. Copyright © 2018, eProseed and its affiliates. All rights reserved.
TIP!
Extension available for
Microsoft VS Code editor
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31. Summary
32
1998

32. Summary
• Multi Cloud Enterprise Platforms and Automation is the reality
• Infrastructure, Platform as Code for standardisation and
simplification of Modern Platforms
• Terraform is the de-facto popular IaC-PaC tool but not fully cloud
independent
• Terraform patterns can help with platform portability
• Terraform & Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) fully supported
and now available with ATP/ADW
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33. Copyright © 2018, eProseed and its affiliates. All rights reserved.