Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate

OK so I am trying to upskill as the quarantine is still in place. So after getting my Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Associate certification, I dedide to take it to the next level. And on Monday night I took the exam and pass it with flying colours!

What is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate?

It’s Oracle’s initial exam to validate your knowledge about OCI’s platform. Oracle provides training on every topic in the exam. This includes the following list:

1. Identity & Access Management
   1. IAM
   2. Policies
   3. Compartments
   4. Policy Inheritance & Attachment
   5. Tags
2. Virtual Cloud Network (VCN)
   1. VNC General Concepts
   2. CIDR
   3. IP Addresses
   4. Routing & Gateway
   5. Peering
   6. Security
   7. DNS
3. VPN Connect & FastConnect
   1. Connectivity to On-Premises Network
   2. VPN Connect
   3. FastConnect
4. Load Balancer
   1. Load Balancer Concepts
   2. Private Load Balancer
5. Compute
   1. Compute Concepts
   2. Images
   3. Boot Volume
   4. Autoscaling
   5. Instance Metadata and Lifecycle
6. Block Volume
   1. Local NVMe
   2. Block Volume Concepts
   3. Backup and Restoration
   4. Clone and Volume Group
   5. Boot Volumes
7. File Storage
   1. File Storage Concepts
   2. File Storage Security
   3. File Storage Snapshot
8. Object Storage
   1. Object Storage Concepts
   2. Object Storage Capabilities
9. Oracle Database on OCI
   1. Database Service Concepts
   2. DB System Architecture
   3. Managing DB Systems / Patching / Backup / Security
10. Oracle Autonomous Database
    1. Autonomous DB Concepts
    2. Scaling/Security/Monitoring/Backups/Cloning
    3. Pre-Defined Services/Dedicated vs Serverless

The course by Rohit Rahi and Sanjay Narvekar provides almost 10 hours of video training, which for me to understand and remember took me about 30 hours of study time. This includes notes of 19 A4 pages... front and back! See proof here:

How to pass the exam

Well, it’s pretty straightforward to get the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate certificate: STUDY. If you take the course and do the practice (get yourself a free Oracle account), perform tasks such as:

• IAM: Create compartments, create policies and map them to comparment
• VCN: Create public/private subnet, peer connect VCNs
• Load Balancer: Create a Load Balancer, Configure listener, Configure backend servers, Configure Health Check monitoring
• Compute: Create an instance, SSH into it
• Block Volume: create an image from an instance, create a backup and restore it. Create a volume group.
• File Storage: set up a FSS, mount it on a compute instance, play with the export options
• Object Storage: create a bucket, change visivility, create a preauthenticated request, set up a lifecycle management policy
• Database System: create a DB, play with the options, try backups
• Autonomous DB: create an ADW/ATP, set resource limits, download wallet file, connect with SQL Developer, enable auto scaling

Oracle recommends at least 6 months of practice but if you play around with every option of the aforementioned items, it should give you good confidence when you get tricky questions. Moreover, Oracle provides a free practice test (at least until May 15th) and you should pass that if you want to have any chaces to pass the real one.

When you sit for the exam, you have 105 minutes to complete it. It will be 66 multiple choice quesitons, some single some requiring 2 or 3 acceptable options. Note: you don’t get partial pass (if you tick 2 out of 3 valid answers, you get nothing.

I would also strongly recommend reading this great Oracle blog post by Joe Malewiki Jr with more links about what to study.

Finally, check Oracle’s official study guide to know what to study and what to skip.

Results

After almost 2 hours of testing, I got my pass and a day and a half later I got my Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate certificate issued:

Have any questions? Write a comment or send me an email!