Oracle IoT Cloud Service — How to Provision an IoT Enterprise Service Instance

Great solutions can be created from the intersection of IoT (Edge) and Cloud Computing technologies

by Juarez Junior

Introduction

This tutorial shows the quick steps required when provisioning an Oracle IoT Cloud Service instance.

It uses the Cloud Stack approach that’s a great and easy way to provide all the services and dependencies you may need for your Oracle IoT Cloud Service instance.

The Cloud Stack approach is interesting because it provides several standard out-of-the-box templates that accelerate your task as well as hide you from all the underlying complexities.

Templates transparently isolate you from the dependencies and required version matches that you would need to check and guarantee in order to have the proper service instances along their proper versions provisioned.

In case you want to learn more about the Oracle Cloud Stack approach and the available templates, please check this Oracle by Example quick guide — Getting Started with Oracle Cloud Stack.

So without further ado, let’s create our IoT Cloud Service instance.

Steps

1. Sign in to Oracle Cloud:
2. Open the subscription notification email sent by Oracle. Typically, this email includes the subject line Welcome to Oracle Cloud.
3. Right-click the URL displayed in the My Services URL field and select Open in the new tab.
4. Copy the user name displayed in the Username field and then paste it into the User Name field.
5. Copy the password displayed in the Temporary Password field and then paste it into the Password field.
6. Click Sign In.
7. If this is your first time accessing Oracle Cloud, create a new password and provide challenge questions to verify your access credentials. Click Submit after you create your password and provide your challenge questions.
8. Click Continue if a welcome dialog appears.

Login page

Welcome page

From the main screen, select the hamburger user interface component at the top right corner of your screen (the one inside the red square below). You will see the right side actions bar with the Dashboard option as the default, selected menu option.

Dashboard and Services

Click on Services and scroll down until you see the IoT Enterprise menu list option and then select it.

IoT Enterprise

You will see the Oracle Internet of Things Cloud — Enterprise page with the instances list (it’s still empty, no IoT service instances yet).

Oracle Internet of Things Cloud

Here, as quickly explained previously, we have the option to create the IoT instance and provide all its dependencies manually one by one, or use the Oracle Cloud Stack approach, which is the easiest and less error-prone way.

So let’s select the Oracle Cloud Stack option. Click on the tiny hamburger user interface (UI) component in the top right corner (beside the Welcome! label), you will see the expanded drop-down menu as shown below:

Platform Services options

Scroll down to its last option, Cloud Stack, and select it. You will be taken to our Oracle Cloud Stack page.

Select the Templates tab, type IoT in the search input field, and click the search icon or hit ENTER to find the IoT stack template.

Search the IoT stack template

You will see the results below. Click the Oracle-IoT-Enterprise option from the results list just to see its contents.

Oracle-IoT-Enterprise

Then you can see the compositions of our IoT-Enterprise stack with both the IoT Service topology (and its dependencies) as well as the IoT Enterprise stack template specification in YAML format.

IoT Enterprise topology — services

YAML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files.

In case you do not know what YAML is and want to learn more you can check its site and documentation here.

IoT Enterprise — YAML specification

You can export/save the specification in case you want, just click export for that. Anyway, that’s just to provide more clarity regarding the Oracle Cloud services that are part of our IoT Enterprise stack.

Let’s resume with the IoT instance provisioning process. Click Done and the previous templates list page will be shown again.

Select the (+) icon on the far right at the end of the Oracle-IoT-Enterprise option in order to start the effective instance creation steps based on our selected template.

Add the Oracle-IoT-Entrprise instance

1. Enter the details below in order to create your instance.
2. Name: OracleIoTCSDemo
3. Description: Any description or IoT CS demo as in the screen
4. Template: Oracle-IoT-Enterprise (already selected)
5. Notification Email: your email address
6. Tags: Any tags to group the services/resources, I used oracle as the grouping tag
7. On Failure Retain Resources: In case there’s a failure and you want to retain the resources in order to accelerate the next try
8. Installation Type: Development or Production
9. Username for Cloud Services: The user ID for the related cloud services that will be created, including the IoT Cloud Service
10. Password (to access all services in Stack): The password to access the services along with the user ID above
11. Confirm Password (to access all services in Stack): previous password confirmation
12. SSH Public Key: your public key so that you can remotely SSH in order to access the environment
13. Cloud Storage Container: The information for your Cloud Storage Container, can be provided now with no previous creation. As an example I provided iotcs-OracleSampleSC as the container name, resulting in the URL https://uscom-east-1.storage.oraclecloud.com/v1/Storage-gse00014235/OracleSampleSC
14. Cloud Storage Username: the user ID for this container, juarez.admin in the example
15. Cloud Storage Password: the related password for the user ID just above
16. Import private key: here you need to provide your private key file
17. Create a spare JCS instance: in case you want a spare JCS (Java Cloud Service) as shown in the previous topology diagram
18. Enable IoT Device Simulator: check to enable the out-of-the-box IoT device simulator
19. Content Storage Container: the same as above, you can reuse the previous one: https://uscom-east-1.storage.oraclecloud.com/v1/Storage-gse00014235/OracleSampleSC
20. Use the same credentials as Cloud Storage Container: to reuse the same credentials, that is, juarez.admin in the example

IoT CS instance details — part 1

IoT CS instance details — part 2

Now you can click Next.

Click the Next button

You will see the confirmation page.

Last step — confirmation

In case you want you can also download the instance information in JSON format. In case you’ve never heard about JSON, it stands for JavaScript Object Notation.

It is a lightweight data-interchange format that’s easy for humans to read and write as well as also easy for machines to parse and generate. It’s becoming one of the de-facto standards for modern architectures, solutions, and MicroServices. You can check more about JSON here.

Just click the icon with the arrow down as shown above and the JSON file will be downloaded.

Now you can just click the Confirm button and your instance creation process will be started as shown below.

Provisioning for stack ‘OracleIoTCSDemo’ initiated

Wrap up

That’s it! Now you know how easy it is to provision an instance of our IoT Service! I hope you can build great things with the Oracle IoT Cloud Service!

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