OCI Certification Guide

7 min readMay 8, 2020

In the last two weeks I have sat (and passed) the 5 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) exams.

Lots of people, internal and external, have asked me to share my experience, any useful pointers and resources for each of the certifications and so on.

To set the scene, I am employed by Oracle as a technical expert in OCI (IaaS) within the UK Sales organisation and so I was starting with a good grounding in OCI; I had also passed the 2018 Associate Architect exam back in March 2018 when the exam was first released.

Certification Levels

Below are the 5 certifications, set out to show the different tracks and competency levels.

As can be seen in the graphic above, there are currently 3 different certification grades — Foundation, Associate and Professional. I thought it may help to give you some examples around the style and the depth of the questions in each. All questions are multiple choice — choose 1 from four, 2 from five or 3 from six etc.

Foundation — Know the use case for each service, know the concepts behind the architecture of OCI in terms of availability, account structure and be able to differentiate between the services. Technical detail is extremely high level. Questions are generally short.
Associate—Foundation level plus a working knowledge of each service. Know how each service works, how to configure and use each service, how to combine services and an element of troubleshooting each service. Associate level exams require technical know-how — e.g. for the Architect track, how network subnetting / CIDR masks apply, how and what you need to specify to create Block Volume backups or the different configurations for Oracle Data Guard. Questions range from one sentence to a paragraph in length.
Professional — Associate level knowledge plus detailed troubleshooting, knowledge covering a wider range of services, combining multiple services and a strong focus on building solutions. Specific technical detail of individual services is not enough at this level — it is required to then know how to combine them to create a solution. Of course, some questions will ask very low level technical information about a specific service, but not many. Most questions are more generally one or two paragraphs in length and will set out a problem statement with requirements and ask, for example, what is the most cost-effective and efficient way to meet those requirements.

By way of an example of the different levels, take Identity and Access Management (IAM) as a topic. Foundation might ask you which service is used for Role Based Access Control policy within OCI, Associate might ask what is required to allow users to create resources in a Compartment and Professional might ask you how to write a policy to allow a group of compartment admins to manage a set of resources within that compartment, but not to delete any resource.

Certification Content and Resources

Below, I review each of the 5 certifications and list resources that I believe will help you pass each exam beyond the provided Oracle University Learning Paths.

I took the exams in a slightly strange order, mainly because I initially set out to add Professional Architect to my 2018 Associate Architect, however, because the exams were free and in order to help my fellow colleagues prepare for each exam, I then decided to sit the other four.

As mentioned, the main resource for each certification is the Learning Path available from Oracle University:

There is more information on each certification within the OCI training section, including links to download the slides used in the Learning Path training videos:

Across all the exams, especially the Associate and Professional exams, there really is no substitute, in my opinion, for reading through the documentation for each service covered in the exam. The OCI documentation is here: https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/home.htm

OCI Foundations 2020

I took the Foundations exam having passed the Professional exam a few days before. My background in OCI meant I did not review the content within the Oracle University Learning Path for this exam but know many colleagues who did and believe that no other resources are required — if you know the content covered in the courses, you will pass the exam. The practice exam in the Learning Path provides a fair representation of what you can expect in the real exam.

OCI Architect Associate 2019

The OCI Architect Associate exam tests your knowledge of the core building block services within OCI and again, I took the exam without reviewing the content. However, I have several colleagues who have passed the exam and say that the Learning Path coursework set them up for success. I suggested that they also review the Troubleshooting topics within the documentation for each service covered by the exam — for example, here is a link to the Troubleshooting a File System. Another very worthwhile read is the IAM Common Policies page within the documentation.

Since passing the exam, I have helped others with questions on the practice exam and find it to be a fair reflection of the real exam.

OCI Architect Professional 2019

This exam tested every area of my OCI knowledge and is more solution than individual service focused.

I reviewed a good proportion of the content for this certification within the provided Learning Path, especially the database elements because I have a strong IaaS background and most definitely no real database knowledge. A note on the database content of the Learning Path— whilst you should understand the concepts of database performance, you will not need to know how to analyse AWR reports for the exam. Pay attention to the HA/DR options as well as migration approaches for database.

You need to know all the services, their particular intricacies and as well as troubleshooting individual services, you will be asked to troubleshoot scenarios. Spend time reviewing the Troubleshooting sections in the Documentation. Ensure you know how to write complex IAM policies and be familiar with the advanced features of each service — again, the documentation is your friend.

The practice exam is very representative of the real exam style and level of knowledge required.

OCI Operations Associate 2019

I reviewed all the content in the Learning Path for this certification. Whilst, for any of the certifications, it is not expected that the training alone is sufficient to pass the exam and that you will also need real hands-on experience, for me this definitely the case with this track — perhaps because I work in Pre-Sales and, although I help customers onboard and begin their OCI adoption, I do not operate a large OCI environment on a daily basis.

If you do not use the OCI CLI or Terraform regularly then I strongly recommend spending time learning how to do everything that you would normally do in the Console using each of these two tools. Also spend some time familiarising yourself with the OCI Ansible modules. Doing so, I definitely find the CLI, especially with the OCI Cloud Shell, a hugely helpful assistant on a daily basis! For the exam, you will need to be very familiar with the CLI syntax across all services. Be familiar with Terraform syntax, and how to work with it from the command-line as well as OCI Resource Manager.

The exam also covers topics beyond the operation and automation tools — you will need to have a good knowledge of the Monitoring service, both querying Metrics and how to use and configure Alarms. You will need to know how to use various services to meet specific RTO/RPO requirements, how to build and scale deployments, automatically, horizontally and vertically and yet again I will strongly recommend reading the Troubleshooting sections in the documentation. Knowing the best practices for securing services in OCI is a must and how to audit activity.

Finally, I personally found the practice exam to be easier than the level of the questioning in the real exam.

OCI Developer Associate 2020

I reviewed all the Learning Path material for this certification. I only had a very high level working knowledge of the API Gateway and Kubernetes, with slightly more experience with Functions.
Understandably, the Learning Path and our documentation cover the Oracle Kubernetes Engine service but not Kubernetes (K8s) itself — for that I needed to do some research and found these resources really useful:

Learn Kubernetes Basics with interactive tutorials
kubectl cheat sheet

I also definitely benefited in the exam from having spent a few hours testing with a deployment on top of OKE. I used the NGINX Hello container to help me learn how to deploy and scale a deployment on OKE, how to upgrade node pools, attach persistent storage and so on. I worked through the examples shown in our documentation.
Spend time reading the documentation on Troubleshooting, debugging and logging OKE and Functions as well as the syntax and use cases for API Gateway. I would also suggest you read the documentation sections covering Events, Notifications, Monitoring and Streaming.

Beyond OCI services, the exam covers Cloud Native design patterns, the benefits and methodologies behind micro-service based architectures, CI/CD and testing. For the Cloud Native design patterns section, I found a useful section in the Azure Cloud Native Architecture documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/) which helped cement my understanding.

Finally, the practice exam was, in my opinion, slightly harder than the level of the actual exam.

Summary

I hope this is helpful and wish you luck with your studies. Using the Learning Path material, together with the documentation and hands-on time with the services, will give you everything you need to achieve these 5 certifications.

I also strongly suggest that you stay clear of brain dumps.