That Finnish Guy

Earlier this week I took the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Architect Associate certification 1Z0-932 which I had been studying for few months while using OCI at the same time. Glad to say I passed it with good score to leave me happy on the effort!

As the certification is quite new there isn’t a lot out there what you should focus on while studying. Oracle has put out the exam topics here. As you can see it lists most of the services related to OCI and how you should be familiar with those.

In my study I wanted to focus on few specific areas – getting idea on how the overall network services work with OCI , Database service and also Identity and Access Managent (IAM). Now after the test I’d say this was a good approach. You really should know the network components inside out and get idea on how to build high availability solutions. Understand what difference you have with public and private subnets and how you can access different components from subnets and how you setup load balancers for high availability.

On the Database service you want to understand what types of service you can use and how the backups and restores are handled. Databases are still Oracle’s core offering so obviously a lot of questions are from this area.

With IAM once you get the concept of policies, compartments and groups learning it comes quite easy. This is different compared to AWS IAM and is one of the best features of OCI so learn it!

I had also gotten quite familiar with Terraform and this was reoccurring topic in the exam. It’s good Oracle tries to get you focusing on infrastructure as code and automation as that should be at least considered in each OCI project as a possibility.

Each OCI service was covered in the exam so remember to study all of them! During studying I used the youtube videos of OCI fundamentals by Oracle and read the Online Documentation few times through.

I’d suggest also creating free account for OCI which gives you 30 days time to test things while you are studying. Using the services and console you get the idea how you can create resources and what is needed when you create each resource.

If I compare OCI and AWS Solution Architect certifications then AWS understandably has wider range of services what you need to learn but both concentrate on similar topics so studying for one gives you a good basis for another! AWS certifications I did earlier this year definitely helped on the network concepts.

Hope this helps you on your study!