During my cloud learning journey , this was my second certification for cloud. Although, this is foundation level of certification by Oracle but this is very important for basics of Oracle cloud.

I prepared almost 15 days for the certification and would like to share my experience.

1) Firstly, I have check the syllabus deeply for this certification and what all topics I will have to cover.

2) As I had some basic knowledge of cloud concepts so refreshed my memory.

3) then, I have started watching oracle official video for OCI which was really good and easy to understood.

4) As I always prefer to make notes for important things and concepts so made this time also.

5) After competing  watching videos and making notes, I revised my notes once what I made.

6) Some general important topics and concepts  I explored from internet.

7) I focused more on pricing and support plans because these were small topics but we can make good score.

8) Final revision I did and went for certification then passed.

All the best !!

Exam details:

Exam Duration: 85 minutes

No. of Questions: 55

Passing Score: 68%

Achieved Score: 100%

1) Getting started with Cloud

• Understand the differences between different cloud computing service models IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS
• Understand Public, private and hybrid cloud computing models
• Understand the cloud terminologies High Availability, Fault tolerance, elasticity, scalability
• RPO vs RTO in terms of DR
• CAPEX vs OPEX and how TCO reduced by migrating from CAPEX to OPEX using public cloud infrastructure

2) OCI Architecture

• Clearly understand the key components of OCI architecture Regions vs Availability Domains vs Fault Domains, as there would be few questions around these concepts testing your knowledge of architecting a HA, Fault tolerant and resilient architecture
• Region: A Localized geographic area, comprised of one or more AD's is chosen based on Location (proximity to your users), Service availability and Data residency & compliance.
• AD: One or more fault-tolerant,isolated data centers located within a region. Each AD has 3 FD's 
• FD: Grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an Availability Domain to provide anti-affinity(logical data center)
• Compartment is a collection of related resources to isolate and control access to your resources, which can interact with resources in other compartments and resources from multiple regions can be in the same compartment. 
• Compartment can be nested up to 6 levels deep.
• Always recommended to create dedicated compartments instead of creating them in root compartment.

3) Core OCI services

a) Networking services

• Understand the SDN construct of OCI networking VCN and associated concepts of subnet, CIDR
• VCN can have both public and private subnets
• Understand the use cases of different gateways: Internet gateway, NAT, Service, DRG
• IPSec VPN vs FastConnect
• VCN security using security lists and Network security groups (NSG)
• VCN peering: Local vs Remote
• LB and its algorithms
• DNS and traffic management steering policies

b) Compute services

• Understand OCI Compute Services (Bare Metal, Virtual Machines, Dedicated Virtual Hosts, Container Engine {OKE: Oracle Kubernetes Engine} and Functions) and its use cases.
• Understand the differences between horizontal and vertical scaling
• Understand Autoscaling 

c) Storage services

• Understand different storage services (Block volume, Object storage (Standard {Hot}, Archive {cold}), File storage, Local NVMe) and their use cases.
• Difference between Boot and Data volume
• OCI provides no RAID, snapshots, backups capabilities for NVMe devices and customers are responsible for data durability

d) DB services

• Understand OCI Database Services (Virtual Machine, Bare Metal, Exadata DB Systems, Autonomous — Shared, Autonomous — Dedicated) and their use cases
• Understand RAC and Dataguard for HA purposes
• Know which DB services support dynamic CPU and storage scaling
• Autonomous Databases: Fully managed database with 2 Workload types: Transaction processing, Data warehouse
• For best performance OLTP database use Exadata DB

e) IAM

• Understand the concepts: Users, Groups, Instance prinicipals, Dynamic Group
• Authentication methods in OCI: Username and Password, API Signing Key and Auth Tokens
• Authorization by writing policies
• Policy syntax: Allow to in where
• Verbs: Inspect, Read, Use and Manage
• After signing up for a new OCI tenancy,need to subscribe to the REGION in order to deploy Infrastructure and services in different parts of the world

f) Other services

• Registry: OCIR is a managed Docker container registry service to pull images for k8s deployment
• Market place: Here you can find listings for two types of solutions from Oracle and trusted partners: images and stacks. These listing types include different categories of applications. 
• Data safe: Focused on the security of your data. Features include Security Assessment, User Assessment, Data Discovery, Data Masking, and Activity Auditing.
• Data catalog:metadata management solution
• Data flow: For running Apache Spark applications.
• Data integration: ETL processing
• API Gateway: To publish APIs with private endpoints that are accessible from within your network, and which you can expose with public IP addresses if you want them to accept internet traffic. 
• Resource manager: Leverages Terraform to configure infrastructure as a code
• Events: To create automation based on the state changes of resources throughout your tenancy
• Notifications: broadcasts messages  to distributed components through a publish-subscribe pattern. Used when event rules are triggered or alarms are breached, or to directly publish a message.
• Storage Gateway: Lets you connect your on-premises applications with OCI for data transfer, cloud tiering, backups, archival & DR purposes.
• Audit: Audit service automatically records calls to all supported OCI public API endpoints as log events. Information in the logs includes the following:
  • Time the API activity occurred
  • Source of the activity
  • Target of the activity
  • Type of action
  • Type of response
• OS management: To manage updates and patches for your OS in OCI instances

4) OCI shared security model 

• Customer responsible for security in the cloud
• Oracle responsible for security of the cloud
• Security Services
• IAM: OCI IAM, MFA, Federation
• Data protection: Key management, Data safe, Storage & DB services
• Infrastructure service: VCN NSG, SL, WAF, DDoS Protection (in-built)

5) OCI pricing, billing, SLA and support

• Pricing Models: Pay as you go (PAYG) , Monthly Flex (Universal Credits), Bring Your Own License (BYOL)
• Data transfer costs: Data Egress to the Internet, Transferring data across regions
• All OCI regions have the same pricing!
• Cost management: Using tags and compartments
• Cost analysis: Filter costs by Date, Tags and Compartments
• Budgets: set on cost-tracking tags or compartments, budget alerts are evaluated every 15 minutes and an alert can be sent when you might exceed your spending threshold
• Dedicated virtual hosts are billed for the Virtual Machine hosts and Boot Volume
• There are stopped state charges for Dense I/O, GPU and HPC Instance, not for Standard compute shapes
• Usage reports: Detailed information about your OCI consumption, automatically generated daily
• Be thorough about the services in Free tier vs Always free
• SLA (Offered: Control, Data, Performance; Not offered: Service/application Plane)
• To register and log support requests, you would need
• Customer Support Identifier (CSI)
• Tenancy OCID
• Resource OCID

6) Final thoughts:

• Remember the scope of various resources (Global vs Regional vs AD)
• Understand the use cases of each resource in OCI
• The questions are simple, yet can be confusing. As you would have ample amount of time left, please spend time on reading the questions thoroughly. Though Oracle writes in BOLD (NOT suitable) and confirms how many options have to be chosen, it’s worthwhile spending time in reading the question a bit slow until you are clear.
• Don’t jump the gun. For instance, I have seen many of our peers stating to choose object storage for the preferred method of storing on-prem backups. But sometimes, the other part of the question can also mention that the cheapest available storage option for such backups.
• Always remember to choose IaaS as the cloud computing model, whenever you would like to customize the setup to the fullest.
• Be thorough with OCI compliance standards (ISO, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC ). The complete list can be found at https://www.oracle.com/in/cloud/cloud-infrastructure-compliance/

All the best!

Exam Code : [1z0–1085–20]

I am going to write down in easy steps so that it’s easier to follow!

Step 1 :

Firstly, watch official videos :

Take the screenshot of each slide of every chapter. Print every chapter and have it with you accordingly like this:

Step 2:
Watch the videos again and then note it down on the printed notes that you have with you. It’d take around 10 hours in this process or so.

Step 3:
Revise the notes daily, it’d take hardly 1 hour or so to revise.

Finally:
One day before exam and on the day of the exam, please follow these three videos, two of which covers theoretical concepts and one of them is for lab practice:

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBfLrszykB0&

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeMTApnv_X4

3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82_7r9Ey0bo&

Thanks to Ahmed Mekawy for uploading such helpful videos!

Afterwards, Attempt the practice exam which is available at Oracle’s Official website which has 20 questions and etch them into your brain :

At last, See this video for the questions : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLkZqtdoaTo

Please note that the answers mentioned in the video are wrong. So, if you have studied thoroughly, you’ll be to point out the correct answers!

Result:

Practice Exam

I recently passed the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations 2020 Associate Certification.

This is an entry-level exam provided by OCI and is a good stepping stone to enter the world of Cloud Computing.

Anyone having previous knowledge on the basics of cloud computing or having passed any other exams related either by AWS, Google, Azure, etc can easily learn, prepare and appear within a week's time for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations 2020 Associate.  But of course, you need to get a free slot of your convenience subject to the one available across the FREE Exams tenure between 15th June 2020 and 15th August 2020 as currently provided FREE OF COST by OCI. If going by the paid enrollment process, you can get your exam slot scheduled at your own personal time and convenience. 

I would strongly suggest going through the Oracle Learning Video Lectures by Rohit Rahi, very diligently and dedicatedly to understand the various conceptual fine line points on Regions, AD, FD, IAM, COMPUTE, STORAGE, HA, DR, SLA, COSTS, BUDGETS, EVENTS, FUNCTIONS, etc, and sure enough with comfortable ease, one can pass the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations 2020 Associate Certification. 

Thank you for reading my review and hope it helps you achieve success at the exam. God Bless :)  

It was a release day from my current account, 4/30/2020. I worked with an awesome architect Mukesh Sharma, who has motivated me to appear for this exam. Apart from motivation, willingness and efforts are very important to accomplish certification.

My last project was implemented with server less architecture on AWS cloud platform. The experience of AWS cloud platform was quite helpful to understand OCI foundation course (create Free login to access the course).

How to prepare for exam varies person to person and there is no specific way to master, however keep tapping on basic concepts, revise it at least 2 times. Do hands on OCI console (which is free till $300 for 30 days). Don't ignore anything by thinking it's just foundation and there won't be depth level questions. 

I would like to focus on How to Attempt Exam:

1. Attempt all questions (there is no -ve mark system).

2. There is an option to 'Review' the opted question by clicking on 'Mark' on top right corner. So every question that we mark, we can revisit.

3. Categorize questions : a. I can answer 100% b. I know the answer but not confident c. I don't know the answer d. Multiple answers to select.

4. Use the elimination strategy to confirm answers for point b. c. and d. If still confusion, mark it for revisit. You can mark revisit option for the questions you are 100% sure as well.

5. While revisiting questions, try to co-related situations that you have experience with or that you recall from your study or preparation. 

If you follow above strategy, I think certificate is yours!!!

Thank you Mukesh Sharma for providing above guidelines!

This is my first attempt on a cloud certification, though its at a basic level I personally learned a lot. The training videos by Rohit Rahi were good to understand the concepts. The tips mentioned in the various reviews of  reviewnprep especially by Haman Sharma for this course helped me to concentrate on the specific topics needed from the certification stand point. 

I agree with other folks that some topics were not covered in the training videos which are being asked in the certification exam. I felt like some questions almost needed real time cloud practitioner experience. 

It took me over 1 day to cover the topics mentioned in the video. Call me old schooled but I prefer to write down notes which I personally feel helps in retaining the information for longer time. I also took the sample practice test by Oracle which had roughly 25 to 30 questions which gives you a glimpse of final certification exam. I went through training videos again for few topics with 2x speed. (experience with Netflix binge watching did help here! :)) 

Hope this helps in case anybody is looking to get certified in OCI foundations. Good luck!

Like the name suggests, " The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Certified Associate" is a foundation level certification. It took me 3.5 - 4 hours to prepare for this exam. The focus of the exam is on the core cloud offerings of Oracle. If you already have some experience with any public cloud offerings, this exam is a walk in the park. I found a few services which were not mentioned in the training material, maybe they don't want you to get a 100, or maybe they want you to dig deep in the documents. If you are a student or anyone interested to get started with Cloud, this a fine opportunity.

Cloud certifications are usually very expensive, but Oracle Cloud is offering free training and certification until May 15th, here is the link.

https://www.oracle.com/corporate/blog/free-certifications-oracle-oci-autonomous-033020.html

Note: If it's is your first time exploring Cloud, I would recommend you to have basic understating of,
1. Cloud deployment model. ( Public, Private and Hybrid cloud)
2.Cloud service model. (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS )
3.Recovery Point Objective(RPO) and Recovery Time Objective(RTO).
4.Difference between block storage vs file storage vs object storage.

I used following resources to pass the exam

Review N prep blog by Haman Sharma

Oracle.com/education

I found the blog as well as the exam in the course. I wish everyone best of luck for the exam. 

Today I passed OCI Foundations 2020 Associate.

Some topics had not been covered in the Oracle course videos, as the following ones :
– Support
– SLA
– Security standards (ISO, etc.)

Try to go trough the documentation for more details about these topics

I recommend reading once the glossary : https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/General/Reference/glossary.htm

I recently cleared the OCI foundations 2020 exam. Although the other review on this exam on this very website are sufficient, the following could be useful to someone studying for this exam : 

1. Make sure to go through the video lectures twice in order to understand everything better.
2. Although the online videos on Oracle University are enough, try and read more about each service from the official website.
3. Databases and Storage make up a good portion of the exam.
4. Read about all the ways to connect your on-premise resources to OCI.
5. Shared security model is important.
6. Make sure to read about SLAs and Audit services since these weren't covered in the online lectures.

I recently took the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Foundation Exam 1Z0-1085-20. This is the most basic exam in the series of 5 exams (blog coming soon) that Oracle offers. I took the proctored exam online and I was able to pass in my first try. For those of you planning to take this exam, Oracle is offering not only free online training but also free certification on PearsonVue. More details for this are here. 

Now for the exam itself. Since this is the foundation level course, if you have prior knowledge of any cloud provider, it should be a walk in the park for you. I completed the online course (~3.5hours long) by Oracle instructor Rohit Rahi. The course talks at a high level about what cloud is in general and all the OCI services. The duration of the course is not too bad for an intro level certificate. The exam is 105minutes long and 60 questions, which means you have roughly 2minutes to get to the right answer. I finished the exam in 45minutes and went over all the answers again. After taking the exam, I feel some of the topics were missing in the online videos like SLA, Oracle db resource manager, what practical solution needs what service. Being an intro level certification, I was not expecting these. In a way it’s good, I went over the online videos twice as it helped me retain the materials better. For the second time, I did it at 1.5X speed and saved some time. It took me 3 days from start to finish to achieve this certification. 

Let us talk about the important things you need to remember for this exam. You can be asked a question from each of the following section:

1. Common cloud question that is often asked in most fundamental exams - Difference between:
   • Capex and Opex 
   • IaaS, PaaS, SaaS 
   • Scale In-Out, Up-Down. Note that downtime is required for scaling up/down 
   • Public, private and hybrid cloud models
   • RPO vs RTO
2. OCI Infrastructure:
   • OCI has Regions, Availability Domains (AD’s), Fault Domains (FD’s).
   • 3 FD’s for each AD.
   • You can be asked on how to create a Fault tolerant architecture with Multi-AD, One-AD, along with the use of multiple regions when deploying the resources.
3. Compartments to isolate and control access. Can also be used to analyze cost and assign budget.
4. You should know when you need Bare Metal, Dedicated Virtual Hosts, Virtual Machine, Container Engine and a Function. There can be couple of questions based on this.
5. Storage Services
   • Know the difference between Boot Volume and Block Volume. Boot volume is a type of block volume. There are three types of Block volume – Basic, Balanced and Higher Performance. You won’t be asked the numbers around throughput or IOPS but remember which has highest and lowest. Block Volume stores replica of data in 3 separate FD’s.
   • Local NVMe is not durable but can survive a reboot. It has high performance. Because it is locally attached, there are no backups
   • File Storage is fully managed and has three backups
   • Object storage is bucket storage. It is for unstructured data (images, logs, video). Use of PUT and GET for object storage. It has two Tiers – Standard (hot) and Archive (cold). There will be questions based on this.
6. Networking Services
   • VCN – Virtual cloud network is a software defined construct
   • Know the types of gateways – IGW (Internet gateway connect to Internet), NAT Gateway (only outbound, no inbound), DRG (Dynamic gateway to connect to on premises datacenter using IPSec VPN), service gateway (connects to internal resources). There will be questions based on this
   • Understand the difference between Local VCN Peering (same region) vs Remote VCN Peering (2 different regions) and peering is not transitive
7. Security
   • You can put firewall rules at NIC or at subnet level
   • Understand what is the responsibility of Oracle (Security of cloud) and what is Consumer responsibility (Security in cloud)
   • When to use MFA vs Federation
   • Oracle allows Key Management as service (allows BYOK).
   • I was asked a question around certificates that oracle has for security
   • Oracle Data Safe, Web Application Firewall (WAF)
8. Understand about Load Balancer. This is highly available and scalable resource
9. IAM, Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
   • Understand about users and groups. Instances can also be treated as users when it comes to permissions.
   • Know the difference between Authentication and Authorization. Authorization on policies can be of type inspect, read, use and manage
10. Database Services
    • There are VM Db systems (Fast provisioning and you can change storage)
    • Bare Metal (Fast performance and you can change CPU only)
    • Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC - highly available)
    • Exadata Db system (fully managed and used for OLTP)
    • Autonomous (Shared and Dedicated). This is highly secure, and self-repairing, self-driving
    • Know that patching is a two-step process. You patch the instance and then you patch the db.
    • Understand what is Data guard vs Active Data guard. How these are used for Disaster recovery (DR)
    • You will be asked few questions in this section
11. Pricing and Billing
    • You have 3 plans – Pay As You Go (PAYG), Monthly Flex and BYOL
    • Important thing to note is all regions have same pricing
    • There is no ingress cost. Unlike other cloud providers, there is no egress cost between AD in one region. But there is egress cost between two regions
    • You can track cost/budget by using tags. The budget service runs every 15mins and can send you an email. Reports are retained for one year

That's it folks. I hope you found this helpful. Message me or follow me on LindkedIn if you have any questions. 

Haman Sharma