More than ever, infrastructure is an essential tool to a Cloud-based solution. Not only are power and efficiency of a provider’s infrastructure important, but also speed of deployment, ease of access, and maintenance. Auto-Provision and Report Generator are two Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tools that make this happen.

Xuan Gao and Anderson Cardoso, two Solution Engineers at Oracle, walked through both forward and reverse engineering through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Auto-Provision and Report Generator tool. They also showed how cutting-edge technology is used in Oracle Cloud solutions, making them easy, quick, and efficient for all.

OCI Auto-Provision Tool

Xuan Gao explained that the Auto-Provision tool enables users to take an image of a network architecture, draw it on a physical surface (a whiteboard, piece of paper, etc.), and use that image to directly provision the network architecture on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Imagine that you are a Cloud architect addressing your company’s infrastructure needs. Suppose that you want to know how your network on OCI would look. Whiteboarding a solution is simple, but manually provisioning a network always takes longer. In a world where time is money, immediate feedback and results are important to development.

The Auto-Provision tool only requires a hand-drawn architecture and takes only a few minutes to provision a network on OCI. It is designed to be easy, quick, and convenient for users.

OCI Report Generator Tool

After provisioning your network on OCI, what if you want to manage your OCI or want a JSON file for further use? In the video below, Anderson Cardoso gives a demo of reverse engineering through OCI Report Generator tools.

Imagine that you are an infrastructure architect for a multi-national retail corporation. Let’s say that you are responsible for the upkeep of the underlying infrastructure throughout several stages of the development lifecycle. As a professional, you understand that both the development world and the operations world are constantly evolving. You know that companies are moving toward a dynamic and collaborative business model. This results in teams from different stages of the development lifecycle having to collaborate and share information and resources. This means that communication must be fast and concise in order to maintain pipeline integrity.

With a more dynamic project development style, certain problems arise. Not everyone involved in a project has the technical know-how to retrieve information dynamically. Less technical individuals are unable to retrieve and share information or even keep track of what’s going on under the hood. As a result, communication speed suffers significantly. This costs time and money. Luckily, this is where the OCI Report Generator tool comes in.

With the Report Generator tool, a user can retrieve a comprehensive report of the underlying resources by simply entering some credentials and clicking a button.

The Notional Architecture

The Notional Architecture explains both forward and reverse engineering.

A customer takes a picture of a network diagram with her phone. That image is then fed to the shape recognition algorithm using OpenCV. It maps the shapes in the input image to the respective OCI resources and generates a Terraform script to provision them on OCI. By applying that script, you can deploy a network architecture on OCI within seconds.

What if you want to get a summary of what you have on your OCI by simply hitting a few buttons on a keyboard? Customers can use the simplified user interface to enter field parameters like user ID or tenancy ID. The node.js script at the backend process builds parameters to make API calls to OCI.

For step-by-step demos of how both the Auto-Provision and Report Generator Tool, check out the full video below.