Streamlining Operations and Slashing Cloud Costs: A Budget-Friendly Approach to Task Automation

“Cronicle” is an open-source project. Cronicle is a task scheduler and job runner that allows users to schedule and automate various tasks and processes on a server or computer system. It is designed to be simple, lightweight, web based and easy to use. Here are some common use cases and examples of how Cronicle can be used.

• Scheduled Tasks

• Data Processing and ETL

• Report Generation

• System Maintenance and Cleanup

• Batch Processing

• Integration with External Systems

I’ve employed Cornicle in multiple projects to automate specific tasks within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), leading to a substantial reduction in universal credit consumption. Here are the key tasks at a high level

• Stop/Start VM Instances

• Stop/Start DBCS, EXACS

• Scale Up/Down Resources (VMs, DBCS, EXACS)

High-Level Implementation Steps as follows

Step 1

• Provision “Always Free-eligible” VM in OCI

• Arm-based processor

• Shape: VM.Standard.A1.Flex

• Image: Oracle-Linux-8.7-aarch64

• OCPU count: 1

• Network bandwidth (Gbps): 1

• Memory (GB): 6

Step 2

Install the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) SDK in Oracle Linux 8 (OEL 8), you can follow these steps

Set up the prerequisites

• Ensure you have Python 3.6 or later installed on your system.

• Verify that pip (the Python package installer) is installed. You can check by running the following command

• pip --version

Install the OCI SDK package

• pen a terminal or command prompt.

• Run the following command to install the OCI SDK package using pip

• pip install oci

Verify the installation

• Run the following command to check that the OCI SDK is installed correctly:

• python -c “import oci; print(oci.__version__)”

• Follow the prompts to enter your OCI credentials, including your user OCID, tenancy OCID, region, and path to the private key file.

• After completing the configuration, the CLI will generate a configuration file (~/.oci/config) and a private key file (~/.oci/oci_api_key.pem)

Start using the OCI SDK

You can now use the OCI SDK in your Python scripts to interact with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources. Import the oci module in your Python code and use the provided classes and methods to interact with OCI services

Step 3

Install Cronicle in OEL 8 , add events and schedule tasks using OCI CLI commands.

Plugin: Shell Script

Example as follows.

To Scale down EXACS VM Cluster

• #!/bin/sh

• oci db cloud-vm-cluster update -- cloud-vm-cluster-id ocid1.cloudvmcluster.oc1.ap-singapore-1.xxxxx cpu-core-count 0

To Scale up EXACS VM Cluster

• #!/bin/sh

• oci db cloud-vm-cluster update --cloud-vm-cluster-id ocid1.cloudvmcluster.oc1.ap-singapore-1.xxxx -- cpu-core-count 4

To Start DBCS VM

• #!/bin/sh

• oci db node start--db-node-id ocid1.dbnode.oc1.ap-singapore-1.xxx

To Start OCI VM Instance

• #!/bin/sh

• oci compute instance action --action start --instance-id ocid1.instance.oc1.ap-singapore-1.xxx