Detailed Review Of Preparation

While I’m writing this blog, I’ve taken all the Free OCI Certifications that were offered during the pandemic and happy to say that I managed to pass all of them. I’ll write about my overall preparation in a separate blog that will cover all the certs. But it is worth mentioning that before taking developer exam, I've already given Fundamentals, Architect Associate, Autonomous Db, Operations. This blog is dedicated exclusively to OCI Developer Associate Exam (1Z0-1084-20). 

The topics from the official Oracle exam guide include: 

The feedback given to me at the end of the exam: 

One observation I have is that either the official exam guide is not up to date or the feedback topics is not updated. And this is not in sync with this exam pdf.

I mean Oracle, you need to seriously improve on your certification process. 

Nevertheless, as you can see, I did not answer a lot of them right (as always). The goal of a certification is to learn more and validate your learnings. I may not have become an expert going through the official course materials, but I managed to pass so I think, I learnt something. 

The exam has 60 questions and 105 minutes. I’m positive you will be able to finish the exam on time with some time to spare to go through the answers again. 

Here are my preparation tips for this exam: 

1. Again, it goes without saying to go through the official videos (Learning Path) on Oracle University. As always, I think the Oracle content could be made better. Hopefully Oracle is listening. “Dear Oracle, let me know if you need help on how to make your content engaging.”

2. As this is a developer course, API Gateway Service is an important topic. The API Gateway service enables you 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. Make sure you go through the official documentation for this topic. I believe I must have had minimum of 4 questions in API Gateway. 

3. Being a developer, you need to be familiar with Kubernetes and Docker. I’m actually disappointed that some questions in the exam were truly Kubernetes and had nothing to do with OCI. So, brush up your K8 skills if you haven’t done that. I’ve some commands and K8 policies in my flashcards. It will come in handy to memorize them. Since we are talking Docker and K8, also go through OCI registry. I got couple of questions here.

4. Another important topic is serverless. Functions are important part of OCI offerings. Make sure you remember commands on how to initialize and deploy the function.

$ fn init --runtime java acme-func

$ fn -v deploy --app <app-name>

5. Note that serverless supports Java, Python, Node.js and Go as the programming language. Besides that also remember to note down the policies needed to work with functions. 

6. I was surprised to not see many questions around Terraform. I believe that got covered in OCI Operations. However, do not ignore Terraform (even official Oracle practice exam has remote-exec and local-exec). Also, remember to glance through Resource Manager though. Check out my blog for OCI operations here. 

7. CAP Theorem was talked about briefly in one of the learning path slides. I believe I got a couple of questions there. 

8. Read all about Events. Events enables you to create automation based on the state changes of resources throughout your tenancy. Use Events to allow your development teams to automatically respond when a resource changes its state. You might see some questions on events, especially in conjunction with Functions. 

9. Not to be confused with events, read about log events or audits. OCI Audit service automatically records calls to all supported Oracle Cloud Infrastructure public application programming interface (API) endpoints as log events. I got some questions here. 

10. Read through some of the architecture patters on Microsoft website (yeah, I know I said Microsoft). Important ones to remember are Bulkhead, Cache-Aside, Choreography, Circuit Breaker, Claim Check.

If you have been a developer in your career on a distributed architecture, this exam would not be that difficult for you. 

Important Links:

1. Flashcards
2. Slide Deck
3. Learning Path

All the best for your exam. 

Haman.