Security is one of the biggest topics and concerns in the IT industry nowadays and since more and more services a hosted in cloud environments, the need for secure configurations increases steadily. One small part is to secure any connections in some way or another so that nobody can see your precious data just by capturing data streams. For generic TCP connections the most common way to do this is using Transport Layer Security, or short: TLS and in former times called Secure Socket Layer, short: SSL. And with the release of Let’s Encrypt it became easier to obtain TLS certificates that are widely accepted.
Once you are hosting an application in some environment, doesn’t matter if on-premises or in the cloud, you want to get notified by the application when soemthing happens or you need to take action. As an example let’s assume that may be a GitLab community edition you manage yourself in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. For this purpose there’s an Email Delivery Service which you can use to send mails from your cloud applications. For this to work you have to configure DKIM and SPF records for a DNS domain and configure aproved sender email addresses that may be used by your application. Maybe I’ll cover that in another blog post but that shouldn’t be addressed here now.
Maybe you have realized that when you deploy a compute instance in your favourite cloud environment that the “hardware” clock is set to UTC - which is the coordinated universal time. And that of course totally makes sense, since your cloud provider is operating a global business. That also isn’t a problem if you handle your times and dates in your Oracle database application properly with a timezone component. For this you can save time related data in the TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE datatype. So you can easily at any time present the value in the desired timezone value.