Hi [subscriber:firstname | default:subscriber],
Happy Friday! No newsletter last Friday as it was really slow week again. This week some Autonomous Database updates so let's look at them! Autonomous Service supports now per second billing instead of the old hourly billing and you can now upgrade your Autonomous Database - Shared to 19c!
On a personal note I passed OCI Certified Operations Associate exam on Monday, remember the exams are free until May 15th! If you are thinking of taking this exam know your CLI, monitoring and policies! Exam blueprint has required areas listed so don't trust the videos - be hands-on and read official documentation.
Here is nice FAQ about the free certifications.

New Features
Autonomous Database supports now per second billing, really useful for those automated deployments where you are for example developing something - perhaps you have automated deployment and you can just terminate your ADB once you are done. And next day do the same again.
Autonomous Database supports an upgrade to 19c version now, check details from here.
OCI Console has a new look, check the start exploring section!
File Storage Service supports quotas now, check the section on the supported services and you will see it there.
User-defined metadata can be now set for Object Storage objects. So it's like a name-value pair you assign to them. Easy!
If you don't want your Streaming Pools to traverse through public internet you can now configure private endpoints. In addition they now support customer managed keys as well!

Blogs & News
Few tips on using Autonomous Linux from the official Oracle blog. I haven't used it and it looks kinda cool, if I get my say I usually recommend Oracle Linux for OCI unless there are restrictions. It works really well for most cases so if Autonomous Linux will work well perhaps that's a choice in the future for many.
Alex has good write-up on the OCI Developer certification, thanks! I'm planning to take it next so this will give good guidance. I like if people share in their posts how they studied, not just the general exam blueprints.
Official blog post about the per second billing, but wait! It's not just Autonomous Database but Virtual Machines and Bare metal instances as well!
Using Hadoop across Regions on OCI.
Martin has a post (or a video!) on how to get all necessary TF_VAR variables from OCI Console for Terraform.
It's good to go back to basics every now and then, Pierre has a video on how to spin up a compute instance in OCI.
Ok so I've rant about certifications probably more than I should but another cool thing is that Oracle has put out a practice exam for OCI professional certificate.. and that's now all, it's not just few questions but 50 questions!

If you are planning to take the exam or not going through the practice exam will be good way to understand more on OCI.

Question of the week
Last time I asked:
What is the difference between FastConnect public and private peering?
Answer: With private peering you extend your existing network info OCI Virtual Cloud Network and with public peering you can access Oracle services such as Object Storage without your traffic from on-premises traversing through public internet.
Question this week:
How many Dynamic Routing Gateways can you attach to a single VCN?

Remember


Contact me via Twitter @svilmune or just send an email if you have any ideas, comments or if you see I'm missing some good source for the weekly news.

I'm not in partnership with Oracle in any way so all opinions are my personal views and should not be taken as an official statement from Oracle.
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Simo
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