How I Passed the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Architect Associate Certification Exam Without Any Oracle Experience
The 1Z0–1072 exam blueprint
Oracle is offering tech professionals an important quarantine time present, they’ve made the learning content and certifications for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database tracks completely free. Users now have access to 6 certification exams and an extensive library that comes up to about 50 hours of training material.
This offer is open until May 15 2020. If you plan on taking advantage of it, you’d have to hurry. If you’re able to, you’ll be saving exam fees as high as $245 and annual Oracle University fees as high as $2,995. With many of us currently experiencing some kind of lull in business or work activities due to economic lockdowns, this offer couldn’t have come at a better time.
I passed the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Exam (1Z0–932) in mid-December 2019 at the first attempt and with no prior Oracle experience. If you’re planning to become an OCI Architect Associate, you’ll be sitting for the 1Z0–1072 as the 1Z0–932 certification is set to expire on 1st June 2020.
If I had a crystal ball, I would probably have waited a few months to take advantage of Oracle’s offer as well as to get a certificate with a longer shelf-life. But I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. If the greatest epidemiologists in the world couldn’t foresee that a disease discovered in Wuhan just before New Year would devastate the whole world deep into the new year, how could I have foreseen that Oracle would make such an irresistible offer?
I’m happy to be proven wrong but I didn’t find a significant difference in the course content for the 1Z0–1072 and the 1Z0–932 exams. But don’t just take my word for it. This article isn’t the OCI-equivalent of the two tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. The views expressed here are from my experience. Also, I need to add that there’s no guarantee that if you follow my training regime, you will pass too.
Full disclosure: In my day-to-day work, I am a solutions architect with a speciality in IP networks and cloud computing. I am also AWS certified; I hold valid Solution Architect Professional and Associate certifications. Why this is important is so you understand that even though I was new to Oracle systems, I wasn’t a novice to the cloud.
That notwithstanding, I still found the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Exam to be formidable. Despite my experience, there were a lot of concepts that I was coming across for the first time. Things like Compartments, Cloud-at-Customer and Autonomous Databases.
In preparing, I had to set aside 2 months. I dedicated 1–1.5 hours to studying on weekdays and 2–3 hours on weekends. However, I’d be lying if I said I stuck to that timetable religiously. Maybe if I was more anal about time, it wouldn’t have taken me so long to prepare. If you are planning to take advantage of the Oracle offer, you won’t have that same luxury.
This is the structure of the exam:
- Format: Multiple choice
- Duration: 105 minutes
- Number of questions: 66
- Passing score: 65%
The exam focuses on 5 main areas, namely: identity and access management (IAM), networking, compute, storage and database. This study guide explains each focus area in great detail. It also provides links to white papers and gives directions on how to register for the exam.
I didn’t enrol at Oracle University, the fees were too high at the time (lucky you). However, there were numerous other Oracle resources that I didn’t need to pay for, more on that later. While studying for the exam, I found a useful alternative on Udemy, it was a third-party course delivered by Deepak Brahmbhatt. The tutorial is broken into 2 parts that cost $11.39 each. Finishing the course gave me a good foundational understanding of OCl.
Oracle has self-paced videos and other content that was free to access even before the new offer. The videos are divided into 3 levels: Level 100, Level 200 and Level 300. Level 100 videos teach you the basics of OCI and establish a grounding for more advanced concepts that are approached at higher levels. I’d advise you to go through as many Level 100 videos as you can, most of the concepts detailed in Level 200 and 300 are out of scope for the Associate exam.
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation is the lexicon for the OCI ecosystem and I referenced it every day and twice on Sundays. At the Associate level, what is tested the most is how comfortable you are with the terms and concepts. If there’s one resource that I attribute the largest chunk of my final exam score to, it would be this document.
But I’m a firm believer in the philosophy that the best way to learn about new technology is to get your hands dirty. So as soon as I got comfortable, I took advantage of another great Oracle offer that you will find. Oracle has a trial period for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS-OCI). It gives you access to $300 of cloud credits that are valid for up to 30 days, so it’s best to use it when you’re good to go and not a minute sooner.
For more structured hands-on learning, you can try the self-paced labs at Qloudable. The labs and exercises are free up to a point, after which you have to pay for usable credit. Although Qloudable is great, it wasn’t the path I took. I used a combination of the instructor-led Udemy course and the IaaS-OCI console. My approach was to use the course as a manual for exercises that I attempted in the OCI environment.
A number of the questions in the exam are scenario-based, so I cannot stress the importance of hands-on learning enough; that’s the second most important contributor to my exam score. Besides the exam, it will serve you well in real-world situations like when you have conversations with your colleagues or customers and during job interviews.
There are two other third-party resources that I think might be valuable in your OCI journey, especially during the continuous learning phase after the exam. The first is O’Reilly. In February, the popular training site released a training course for the 1Z0–1072 exam. It takes a deep dive into the exam content. The only problem is you’ll need a $499 per year membership to access it. O’Reilly is a great resource for tech knowledge in general and you might find great material that will be useful in another focus area.
The second resource is K21Academy, a leader in Oracle training. I discovered their training course late in my exam preparation, so I couldn’t take advantage of their expertise. Although, at $799 per year, they aren’t exactly the cheapest way to gain OCI knowledge.
As my exam date approached, I started attempting practice exams. I tried my hands on the Oracle practice exam, my Udemy tutor too had a practice exam module which I purchased for $9.99, and I’ve seen at least one more tutor pop up on Udemy with exams for around the same price. These exams try to give you a feel of what to expect on D-day. Unfortunately, I found them all significantly less challenging than the actual exam. Now, they may end up playing a bigger role in your exam preparation, but they just weren’t worth it for me.
Speaking about worth, one question that many professionals often have is: how much will getting an OCI certification increase theirs? I’d say that depends on two things. First, how well you know the platform beyond the certificate. And second, how much Oracle can increase its market share in the cloud space and, consequently, improve the profile of its certificate holders. You’re only in control of one of those factors, so good luck!
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