The Preface

In my time with Oracle, the company shifted it’s course from OCI-Classic to onboarding all new customers, and migrating current customers to OCI. This would provide some challenges for current customers as they would require an exercise in taking inventory of their current cloud resources. This would help in capacity planning for their future in Oracle’s cloud. Some customers kept up to date spreadsheets of all their current services in OCI-C, while others were seeking help with a more automated approach at mapping their current OCI-C resources.

The Situation

I was assigned to help a customer with their capacity planning for migration. They were in need of some information that Oracle couldn’t provide (as it was beyond a security boundary) and other information that could be provided programmatically using the OPC API. I was determined to give this customer the most information that could be provided in an automated fashion. They were specifically interested in their IaaS compute instances and collecting metadata information about them. I figured a simple CLI application could do the trick.

The Solution

I was able to cobble together a NodeJS application that could be configured with endpoint information, check the user’s credentials and pull all the necessary information down from the API. Once that was done, we could introspect it for the specific information we were looking for and write it to a simple CSV file.

If you’re on OCI-C and need to collect your own IaaS instance information, hopefully this tool can help you too!

Click to check the Repo out on GitHub

I have been doing a lot of research into the MEAN stack as of late in hopes of possibly using in on my next project. First I wanted to see if using TypeScript was viable, because I come from a .NET background and strong types help me find problems at compile time. Then I wanted to see if I could get some sort of debugging experience. I remember the good ol’ days of Classic ASP scripting and having to debug write everything so I could get a picture of what was happening.

Editor(s)

So many to choose from in this department. Personally I chose WebStorm because it afforded me that debugging experience I was looking for in the IDE. SublimeText and VS Code are excellent options as well, but like I said… Debugging.

Getting Lessons

My first round of searches brought me to an excellent video tutorial by Brad Traversy on MEAN Stack Front To Back. It’s a series in which you’ll use ES6 to create a MEAN stack application that does some simple authentication. It’s a great series, I highly suggest watching it and checking out the code here. It uses ES6 and like I said, I’m looking for TypeScript.

My next round of searching brought me to Brian Love’s blog where he has an article TypeScript2 + Express + Mongoose + Mocha + Chai. Whew! That’s a mouth full, and a lot of tech to learn. It’s a fantastic article about combining all those technologies to get a running MEAN stack application with testing. Check out his article here and certainly check out the code here.

Combo

My mission was to combine the two projects to make one MEAN application with a TypeScript and test driven backend and an Angular2 front end. I was able to take the lessons learned about TypeScript, Grunt, Mocha and Chai and apply it to the meanauthapp created in Brad’s videos. It makes for very easy and type-safe development with NodeJS. Big thanks to both Brian and Brad for their work!

Click to check the Repo out on GitHub