I’ve been working with a customer that’s automation tool of choice is PowerShell…..the good news for them was that OCI provides PowerShell modules!

This means that customers can in theory do everything in PowerShell that they can with the OCI CLI.

The following guide steps through the process of setting up the PowerShell modules for OCI – OCI Modules for PowerShell

Once I’d got this setup (which wasn’t very painful), one of the first things that I helped them to automate is producing a list of all of the VM instances running within their tenancy, I’ve included the code for this below:

# Get all VMs
$Compartments = Get-OCIIdentityCompartmentsList -CompartmentId ocid1.tenancy.oc1.. -CompartmentIdInSubtree $true -LifecycleState Active

Foreach ($Compartment in $Compartments) 
{
Write-Host "Compartment Name:" $Compartment.Name -ForegroundColor Green
$Instances = Get-OCIComputeInstancesList -CompartmentId $Compartment.Id
Foreach ($Instance in $Instances)
    {
        Write-Host "-Instance:" $Instance.DisplayName -ForegroundColor White
    }
}

This loops through every Compartment from the root Compartment downwards and lists the VM instances within each of these Compartments.

The only thing that needs to be updated prior to running this script is the OCID of the root compartment (CompartmentId parameter).

Here is the output from my tenancy:

You can see all of the Compartments within the tenancy and the 3 x VM instances that I have:

• N8N
• Streamlit
• Hub-VM

I’ve just (literally) delivered a session at the Oracle User Group UK 2025 Conference and have posted a recording of the session.

This demo-heavy session provides a high-level overview of the OCI Generative AI Agents service and walks through the process of creating an agent and configuring it to address common use-cases, this session was based on real-world customer experience rather than theoretical capabilities – which always help to bring things to life!

If you are unsure what the OCI UK Sovereign Cloud in, please check this out.

This week I’ve been helping a customer to deploy an OCI Landing Zone (the One Operating Entity variant) to their tenancy using Terraform, we ran into a couple of issues that I wanted to document and hopefully help others.

This is caused by two of the Terraform input configuration files having some hardcoded references to the OCI Commercial Cloud (OC1) rather than the UK Sovereign Cloud (OC4), which need to be updated for the configuration to apply correctly – otherwise the terraform apply command will fail.

Issue 1 ❌ – oci_open_lz_one-oe_iam.auto.tfvars.json has references to the services highlighted in the screenshot below:

To resolve this, replace Fssoc1Prod, objectstorage-eu-frankfurt-1 with Fssoc4Prod, objectstorage-uk-gov-london-1

The file should then look like this:

Issue 2 ❌ – oci_open_lz_one-oe_security_cisl1.auto.tfvars.json has 40 references to Security Policies using their actual OCIDs from OC1 – Commercial (see examples below):

The easiest way to fix this is by doing a find and replace of all instances of .oc1.. replacing this with .oc4..

Which should then look something like this:

Note❗️- If you are using the CIS2 version of this configuration file instead of the CIS1 version (as I used) you will also need to make these changes.

That’s it!

I was playing around with Terraform in my lab the other day and attempted to run a destroy operation to tear down everything I’d built – this was to avoid any unnecessary charges for resources that I’m not actively using in my test tenancy 💷.

The destroy operation kept failing with a 409-Conflict error which stated that the subnet it was trying to delete had references to a VNIC, this made no sense at all as everything had been provisioned with Terraform…..and the VM instances attached to the subnet had been deleted earlier in the destroy operation 😤.

I figured out what was actualluy blocking the deletion…..it was a VNIC attached to the subnet, however it wasn’t a VNIC that I (or Terraform!) had created.

As part of the testing I’d done post-build, I had attached the Cloud Shell to a Virtual Cloud Network & Subnet – this enabled me to SSH into a VM instance that didn’t have a public IP address assigned (as I’ve previously wrote about here).

The fix for this was simple, I just needed to close the Cloud Shell session (which detaches the VNIC from the subnet) and retry the destroy operation – which worked this time ✅.

If you run into the following error when using an OCI Generative AI Agent that attempts to use a SQL Tool

User Error: Failed to execute DB query with Error – NotAuthorizedOrNotFound: Authorization failed or requested resource not found with http status 404

If you are like me, the reason for this error is that you didn’t read the manual 🤦, this error is typically returned because the Generative AI Agent service does not have permission to the Database Connection and Key Vault – which is required to connect to the database and run the query generated by the agent.

The fix for this is to create a policy that grants the necessary permissions to the Generative AI Agents service – which is documented here (below for reference too).

Allow any-user to use database-tools-connections in compartment <compartment-name> where request.principal.type='genaiagent'

Allow any-user to read database-tools-family in compartment <compartment-name> where request.principal.type='genaiagent'

Allow any-user to read secret-family in compartment <compartment-name> where request.principal.type='genaiagent'

One thing I’ve been caught out with in the past with OCI Gen AI is when an AI model gets retired and my apps that specifically call the model start to fail as the model is no longer available!

The fix for this isn’t particularly difficult, it’s just a case of updating the code to point to the new model name (via model_id), this can be quite stressful though when you are about to deliver a demo to a customer 😫.

I was really pleased to see the introduction of model aliases (Cohere-only at this time), so rather than using a hardcoded reference to a specific model version you can now use the following aliases, which will always point to the latest version of the Cohere Command R and Coheren Command R+ models.

cohere.command-latest points to cohere.command-r-08-20204
cohere.command-plus-latest points to cohere.command-r-plus-08-2024

Full details are included in the documentation 📖.