Preface

Cloud computing has become a ubiquitous buzzword in the software industry. While almost everyone was trying to define what cloud computing actually meant, few people realized that cloud computing is in fact an old idea. The term ''cloud computing'' is an attempt to group a lot of standard technologies under one umbrella and combine all of these little pieces into a unified shared infrastructure. Cloud computing essentially solves the problem of scale—a problem which otherwise seemed too daunting.

As we move towards massively scaled interconnected software systems, chances are that you will develop and deploy the software for the cloud. Cloud computing sounds like the solution to all the problems related to scalability and fault-tolerant software, but in reality, getting cloud infrastructure right is a very difficult task.

Luckily, over the years, technology that supports cloud computing has stabilized and standardized a lot. Many interesting solutions have been proposed and some wonderful tools have been field-tested in the industry. The most important innovation that really changed the way people used shared infrastructure has been Amazon's Elastic Cloud platform. EC2 demonstrated that cloud could serve massively scalable software systems with superb fault tolerance and performance guarantees.

Enterprise software vendors realized that they will have to embrace the cloud model to offer extremely cost-effective and easy-to-manage software delivery. This realization drove major software companies such as Oracle, VMware, Microsoft, and others to focus on making their enterprise software cloud ready.

Oracle Enterprise Manager offers a great environment for building cloud computing platforms for your enterprise. Oracle Enterprise Manager combines various technologies such as Oracle Database, clustering, virtualization, and network to offer a single solution. As we will see in this book, creating a self-service model of cloud provisioning is extremely streamlined with Oracle Enterprise Manager. Oracle Enterprise Manager supports most complex chargeback models and offers great flexibility in designing your own system of chargeback. We will take a detailed look at the various capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager and how we can effectively utilize them.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Setting Up Enterprise Manager, covers important bits of information to correctly set up Enterprise Manager.

Chapter 2, Infrastructure as a Service, illustrates all the steps necessary to set up an IaaS using Enterprise Manager.

Chapter 3, Database as a Service, covers several DBaaS topologies and techniques in detail.

Chapter 4, Enterprise Monitoring, walks through the chargeback models offered by Enterprise Manager and how to optimize them.

Chapter 5, Cloud APIs, gives an overview of the usage of the programmable interface of Enterprise Manager using the various cloud REST APIs and CLIs.

What you need for this book

Depending on what you want to achieve, you will need a different set of software and hardware. The installation of Oracle Enterprise Manager comes bundled with most of the necessary software, but you should make sure you read the official documentation accompanying your installation media. You must have a working Java installation on the operating system you are planning to use to install Enterprise Manager.

Who this book is for

This book is written as a hands-on guide rather than a text on cloud computing. It is assumed that the reader has an understanding of the basic building blocks of cloud computing , such as networking, virtualization, and storage. This book will help you use and set up Oracle Enterprise Manager features. It is aimed at cloud administrators and users of self-service provisioning systems offered by Enterprise Manager. This book also helps administrators who want to understand the chargeback mechanism offered by Enterprise Manager.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "All the resource models support JSON payloads and defined by media type application/oracle.com.cloud.common.DbPlatformInstance+json."

A block of code is set as follows:

<AGENT_HOME>/bin/emctl secure add_trust_cert_to_jks -trust_certs_loc <location of the certificate> -alias

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$<DB_HOME>/assistants/dbca/templates

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select OMS Shared Filesystem from the administration page."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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