Lessons in Oracle Cloud Password Management by Phil Wilkins

Oracle Cloud is growing and maturing at a tremendous rate if the breadth of PaaS capabilities is any indication.  However, there are a few gotchas out there, that can cause some headaches if they get you. These typically relate to processes that impact across different functional areas. A common middleware stack (API CS, SOA CS, OIC etc) will look something like the following:

As the diagram shows when you build the cloud services, the layers get configured with credentials to the lower layers needed (although Oracle have in the pipeline the Oracle managed version of many services where this is probably going to be hidden from us).when comes credentials Oracle (rightly so) reminds you that your password should be changed on a regular basis.  What is not so clear is that this has an impact on the linkages between the layers.

Once you have changed you password, if you created and used your credentials to authenticate between layers, if you don’t then correct the details on each of the layers then things will start breaking.  Whilst the service to database is obvious and relatively easy to remember, after all these services are more than likely on your dashboard as well. But, because storage isn’t by default shown on the dashboard it becomes very easy to over look.

The impact of this can be subtle at first, as the DBaaS appears to run its DB storage within the VM it will continue to run without issue.  If you have the DB configured to backup automatically, the backups will kind of work.  I say kind of, because what happens is that the DB writes to a file partition on the DBaaS VM, once the backup completes, these files get transferred to Storage. But, now the credentials are impacted this fails, but the cloud doesn’t automatically alert you to the fact, so unless you check regularly backups could fail for a longtime. You only see trouble when the file partition becomes full. This also impacts any DB working space. Net result, is sooner or later the DB can’t handle queries from the application and everything grinds to a stop. Read the complete article here.

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