Five Tips for Creating New Oracle Analytics Cloud Services (OACS) Instances
Recently, I have been assisting customers with creating new Oracle PaaS instances – specifically OACS – and I have come up with a few tips for those new to the process.
Tip #1: Keep a copy of the certificate pair you generate.
PaaS instances require key pair for communication between instances and are also required for remote SSH/SCP access. I am able to reduce clutter by using the same key pair for all instances in a single identity domain. Keep copies of the keys you generate and name them appropriately.
Tip #2: Use a password vault
I quickly learned that memorizing user accounts and passwords for a single identity domain was impossible – for me. Using a password vault has given me a secure means to organize accounts used during configuration and creation of new PaaS instances.
Tip #3: Use generic service type accounts
Provision a generic service administrator account for use when creating PaaS instances. Maybe this is a pet peeve, but I do not like seeing named email addresses in configuration information. For example, the configured network name in OACS includes the user name that created it.
Tip #4: Take screen shots… lots of them
I have had to create the same instances, from scratch, three times due to the frequency of patches and the early OACS release’s ability to accept patches. Prior to OACS 17.4, the only method of obtaining new functionality and bug fixes was to scrape away the current instance and create it again. Since I’ve had to do this a few times now, I have assembled screen shots of every configuration screen.
Tip #5: Check your license – twice
The compute shape and number of database instances are tied to your license. Oracle will merrily bill you if you exceed the number of OCPU (in an unmetered subscription).
