For those of you that still haven’t taken the Free Oracle Training and the certification exams, you still have time. You can take OCI certifications in any order but it is recommended to have the fundamentals ironed out. This time I took the Architect Associate Exam and managed to pass with moderate preparation. I took the OCI Foundations Exam, couple of weeks back and you can read about it in my previous blog. Remember certifications do not land you a job, but can help you get one and it’s a good validation of your skills. Read my earlier blog on why you should get certified.
Now coming back to the OCI Architect Associate Exam. First of all, you should read Mukesh Sharma’s blog that covers all the topics that you might be asked in the real exam. It has a very good summary and excellent preparation notes of all the topics covered in the Oracle videos. This blog covers tips on some questions that you might see in your exam. Please note that this is based on my memory and you might see different topics in your exam. The exam is 105minutes long and it has 66 questions. The official oracle university course is 9hours 40mins long and I must confess that I watched it at 1.5X speed.
So, in a random order, here are the tips on few items that I had in my exam:
1.First of all, it is a must that you go through the original Oracle videos by Rohit Rahi. You do not need any other video content. Oracle University official videos are more than enough.
2.If you haven’t created your OCI account, please do so. Oracle will give you $300 and a free one-month trial. Use it at your own discretion and remember to tear down the environment once you have practiced enough. I got a couple of items on debugging what could be wrong when the instance is not getting traffic from the internet. Know that Instance cannot communicate with another instance in same subnet until you permit them to. So, it is important to familiarize yourself with IGW, Route Tables, Security List, NSG to name a few. I didn’t get any question on port except for one which talked about port 22 for SSH.
3.Remember to at least do one round of provisioning a running environment. I believe the videos could be improved in how other can create their own environment by providing custom scripts and walking through them. I’ve seen people struggle between using OS if they have to SSH into the instance as the setup might differ from Windows vs Mac.
4.Most of the questions I got were with 2 correct choices. So, you really have to understand the OCI services in good way.
5.I got a confusing question on if peering is allowed between two VCN’s and they had CIDR block listed. Understand that for peering to be allowed, there should not be any overlapping CIDR blocks.
6.Know the difference between Internet and VCN Resolver and Custom Resolver.
7.Important to understand how compartments work. I do not remember seeing anything on policy implication when moving compartments. That topic can be a little confusing when you haven’t had any hands-on practice.
8.Another important topic is Connectivity between On Prem and OCI. Also, understand difference between VPN connect and FAST connect and what to use when. It is important to pay close attention to the demo that Rohit Rahi does in the videos.
9.Understand File Storage specially how mounting works. Remember that Mount target has an IP address and DNS name that you use in your mount command. Also, placing NFS client and Mount Target in same subnet can result in IP conflicts as users are not shown which private IP are used for mount target. So, place FSS mount target in its own subnet where it can consume IP as needed. Finally, export path is unique path specified when the file system associated with mount target. /example & /example/path not allowed
10.VNIC’s is another critical topic to understand and remember. Know that each VNICs has one primary private IP can have additional private IPs called Secondary Private IP up to 31 Secondary Private IPs. Ephemeral IP can be assigned to Primary Private IP only. Hence only 1 per VNIC vs max 32 for reserved IP.
11.It is important to remember what type of database to use when and for what option the db storage and/or CPU can be changed.
12.Understand how OCI Data Gaurd is used. Oracle Data Guard is supported on both virtual machine and bare metal DB systems. It is limited to one standby database per primary database on OCI. If the customer has a database license for Active Data Guard or deploys the Oracle Enterprise Extreme Performance package, they can use the standby database in a Data Guard setup for queries, reporting, running tests, or backing up the database from the standby. Understand when to do a planned switchover vs a failover.
13.No exam is complete without question on backups. Remember that by default, automatic backups are returned to Oracle owned object storage. Customers will not be able to view the object storage backups. There are the preset retention periods for automatic backups, 7 days, 15 days, 30 days, 45 days, and 60 days. The default policy cannot be changed at this time. You can also do a standalone backup. On demand standalone full backups are stored till the point you decide to delete it from the OCI console. You can restore a database to the latest backup. Or you can restore the database to the timestamp.
14.All cloud providers judge your knowledge on Load Balances. Remember that Load balancer (LB) stops sending traffic to bad instance. Understand the type LB policies – Round Robin, IPHash, Least Connection. Also, remember to study the health status, drain, offline and backup state.
15.What happens to boot volume when the instance is terminated – you have the option to preserve it. Also, study on boot volume backup and know that it doesn’t require downtime. Also, there is cost associated with amount of object store used to store backup.
16.Image Import/Export questions can be tricky. Image export import enable you to share custom image across tenancies and region. Image export import uses OCI Object Storage. Mode of Import Export to spin your own instance
Emulation Mode - VM IO device CPU & Memory are implemented as software, Emulated VM support almost any X86 OS. These VM are slow
Para Virtualized - VM include a driver specially designed to enable virtualization
Native Mode (SR-IOV Single Route IO Virtualization)- same as Hardware Virtualized Machine (HVM) offers maximum performance with modern OS
17.It goes without saying that Object Storage is an important topic for the exam. Understand how Multipart Upload works. There is a 10TB limit, Individual part can be as big as 50 GB or as small as 10MB. Initiate and upload by calling api CreateMultiPartUpload. Make an upload part request for each object part upload. You can restart failed upload part. No need to restart all upload.
18.Cross region copy is another important topic. Copy objects to other buckets in the same region and to buckets in other regions. For this to happen, you must authorize the service to manage objects on your behalf (Separate policy for each region). In the policy, you must specify a target bucket. Unfortunately, bulk copying is not supported right now. Also, objects cannot be copied from archive storage.
19.Understand the difference between Autonomous Data Warehouse and Autonomous Transaction Processing. The topic can get confusing so, it is important to know the difference and what to use when.
20.Finally, understand where all cloning can take place, starting from Boot Volume, Block Volume, cloning an instance, Cloning a Volume group, Autonomous data base. This is a very important topic.
That’s it folks. This is all that I can remember from what I got in my exam. Please note that I don’t remember the exact question and I’ve listed the topics which are important for you to remember for the exam.
Here is a little summary of my Docker Certified Associate journey. I hope it will be helpful!
The Docker certified Associate Exam is not an easy one. As you probably know, Docker is a really vast product and knowing everything is unfortunately not possible. Even more when Kubernetes is a part of the exam. Thus, here are some recommendations that, hopefully, will help you to win some time:
1. Find the proper course for you. I've followed Zeal's Vora course on Udemy and had no prior Docker knowledge. However, feel free to choose another one. Just make sure that the course you choose contains all the required sections of the exam (Kubernetes in particular).
2. Set an expected end date for training. As this is a long journey, it's better to plan when it will end. Set an expected end date for training and try to stick to it.
3. Read Docker and Kubernetes documentation. Among all the different courses and practice tests you will encounter, there is a high probability that something will be unclear or wrong. If you have any doubt about the accuracy of the info, always take Docker/Kubernetes documentations as a reference.
4. Do the practice tests. Following a course is nice, but doing the practice tests is better. Run the commands on your computer and check the results. This will help you to memorize the outputs.
5. Register for a Docker Entreprise Trial. Use the 1-month free Docker Enterprise Trial to practice even more. This is a part of the exam. I would recommend starting the trial after having some Docker knowledge.
6. Check the DCA Study Guide. Check the guide and make sure that you know all the required info. There are also some sample test questions that you can use to practice.
7. Practice, practice and ... practice. The previous Udemy course contains 5 sample tests (one of 26 questions and four of 50 questions). Do the practice tests, write your incorrect answers and check the results using Docker/Kubernetes documentations if you have any doubt.
8. Practice for the DOMC questions. As DOMC questions are not supported by Udemy, what I would recommend is practicing until you're capable of giving the answer by only reading the question. You shouldn't need to read the answers to find the correct one.
9. Read Kubernetes documentation. The previous course I was referring to contains some Kubernetes notions. However, unfortunately, at the moment the sample tests don't. What I would recommend here is checking the Docker guide and try to understand which parts of Kubernetes are valuable. Then, a good practice would be to read the proper sections in Kubernetes documentation directly.
10. Schedule your exam. When you think you're ready, schedule your exam and prepare a little training schedule for the remaining days.
11. Rest. The day of the exam, practice a little bit but also rest. It's not a few hours that is going to change the fate of the exam.
12. Celebrate. Congratulations, you've passed the exam! Take the time to celebrate and rest a little bit before moving to the next one. :)
The
test is super hard. The exam is long and tiring (3 to 3.5 hours) with 75
scenario-based and problem-based questions with long answers which all seem to
be correct. After 35–40 questions your brain starts melting down and it hurts
when you try to think and analyze.
I was supposed to give it by last DEC-2019 but it was postponed
due to my personal loss (I lost my daughter and she passed away with pulmonary
hypertension) so kept on reading on and off but am dedicated to this as I love
being ‘AWSome’ always .. Finally, I took
the exam in APR 28th, 2020 and passed.
Used to read the question and use paper and pencil to
draw a rough architecture and focus on the areas that you need to improve.
Trust me, you will be able eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus
on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area
and that would help you reach to the right answer or at least have a 50% chance
of getting it right.
The only thing is it is brain drainer and need lot of
patience and calm down during the exam not to lose focus. Fun to be challenge and accept them so that
you will be surprised with outcome that you produce.
It covers a lot of concepts and services related to
Automation, Deployments, Disaster Recovery, HA, Monitoring, Logging and
Troubleshooting. It also covers security and compliance related topics. I did score
well out of all the 6 domains except one domain (Incident and event response-
Needs an improvement) and rest all are meet competencies. The % of scored domains are:
SDLC automation (21.5%), Configuration Management and Infrastructure
as Code (18.5%), Monitoring &Logging (15.4%), Policies & Standards (10.8%),
Incident and event response (18.5%), HA,DR section(15.7%)
Be sure to cover the following topics
Whitepapers are the key to understand Deployments
and DR
·Blue Green Deployments
·Disaster Recovery
·Architecting for the Cloud:
Best Practices
·Building Fault-Tolerant
Applications on AWS
Management Tools
·DevOps professional exam
cannot be cleared without the knowledge of this topics
·Deep dive into
CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks
·Very important to
understand CloudFormation vs Elastic Beanstalk vs OpsWorks
CloudFormation
·Have in-depth understand of
CloudFormation concepts
·Know how to indicate
completion of events using CloudFormation helper scripts.
·Understand CloudFormation
deployment strategies esp. rolling and replacing update with AutoScaling and
update of launch configuration
·Elastic Beanstalk
·Understand Elastic Beanstalk overall
– Applications, Versions and Environments
·Unlike the previous DevOps Engineer – Professional exam, the
latest pattern has a heavy focus on the Developer tools and be sure to deep
dive into them
·Understand CodePipepline, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CodeBuild
and their uses cases
·CodePipeline
·Understand how to build Pipelines and integration with other
Code* services
·Understand CodePipeline pipeline
structure (Hint : run builds parallelly using runorder)
·Understand how to configure notifications on events and
failures
Monitoring
& Governance tools
·Very important to understand AWS CloudWatch vs AWS
CloudTrail vs AWS Config
·Very important to understand Trust Advisor vs Systems
manager vs AWS Inspector
·Know Personal Health Dashboard & Service Health
Dashboard
·Networking, Security, Storage
and Database domain areas too
Resources:
aws.training
website,AWS whitepapers, blogs, webinars, practice
tests and Udemy courses too. Pluralsight.com is also free sometimes they give
us free month. good to read those. You need to practice and draw the
underlaying architecture components for every scenario which will solve the
puzzle faster.
How to prepare for OCI 2019 Architect Associate exam
I recently prepared for an passed the Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure 1Z0-1072-OCI-Architect-Associate-2019 exam. The format and the
content for the exam is available on Oracle’s education site –
I went through the course once at 2x speed and captured most
of the information in a word document. The exam is supposedly not as difficult
as any other AWS or GCP associate level exams. I am listing the main topics of
the preparation course and some of the key elements you should understand and
remember before you take the #FREE exam offered by Oracle.
To better understand the OCI interface as well as all the
services please review the Infrastructure as a service documentation available
here at OCI
IAAS Documentation site and services availability across regions
across the world.
Lets now focus on individual services and some of the focus
areas to remember
·IAM – There are mainly 4 verbs used in IAM to
define a policy and they are inspect, read, use and manage.
oInspect – provided the ability to list resources
oRead – Includes inspect and ability to get user
specified metadata/actual resource
oUse – Includes read + ability to work with
existing resources (the actions vary by resource type). This verb does not
allow the ability to create or delete any type of resource.
oManage – Includes all permissions for the
resource
oThe most common format of an IAM policy is
listed below –
Allow to in
where
The subject can be an IAM user, group, resource group etcetera
Please pay special attention to managing users,
groups,
Dynamic
groups and network
resources. You must specially understand that if you want to provide a
specific role to a compute instance, you need to attach a dynamic group to it
so that it is identified as “principal” and it can make API calls against other
services on OCI.
·IAM-Compartment
– Compartments are another way to manage your resources by relating them
together and accessed by groups that are given permission.
oIt must be understood that each resource can
belong to one and only one compartment. However, resources can be shared
across compartments.
oResources can also be moved across compartments
once they have been created.
oCompartments can have sub compartments that can
go six level deep.
§COMP1 > COMP2 > COMP3 > COMP4 >
COMP5 > COMP6
§These sub compartments inherit access
permissions from compartments higher up the hierarchy
oWhen an IAM policy is being created, it must be
specified which compartment to attach it to.
·IAM Policy Inheritance and Attachment
oUnderstand how IAM policy inheritance work when
resources are moved across compartments.
It should be emphasized that you must have understanding of
creating public and private networks and how all private networks use CIDR
ranges identified under RFC 1918.
The major networking components of OCI networking is listed below -
oDYNAMIC
ROUTING GATEWAY (DRG) – Connect on-premises networking and use it to peer
VCNs across regions with remote peering gateway. Please understand that DRG
connections are always private when used either with Fastconnect for in
premises or with RPC across regions to pair VCNs.
oINTERNET GATEWAY
oNETWORK ADDRESS TRANSLATION (NAT) GATEWAY
oSERVICE GATEWAY – These provide a way to connect
resources in your VCN to other manager services like OCI object storage.
oLOCAL PEERING GATEWAY (LPG)
oREMOTE PEERING CONNECTION (RPC) – Understand the
user dynamic routing gateway (DRG) with on premises versus using DRG with RPC
in a multi-region configuration.
oVPN
Connect – Please do take a moment to understand how to establish cost
effective and redundant connectivity with OCI using VPN connect and DRG. I
found this
example very interesting to read and understand.
§Health Checks – this is a test to confirm the
availability of backend servers. Health check is activated for backends,
backend sets and overall load balancer.
oCloning
a boot volume – Please ensure that you check out the difference between
boot volume backups and clones and how they are mutually exclusive to each
other.
oInstance Configuration and pools – configure and
manage a set of instances/images together.
I want to add a few tips from my experience during the exam
–
§I noticed most of the answers are in the
question, so if you are not completely confident, select what you think is
right, mark the question to come back for review and then revisit it as soon as
you are reviewing your exam.
§You will notice as you traverse through rest
of the tests, some of the questions that follow latter may also have answer to
what you could not answer earlier.
If you are interested in other
cloud certifications and how to prepare for them, check out our website.
AUTHOR: Mukesh Sharma is a multi
and hybrid cloud enthusiast with a bias for building robust hybrid cloud
systems around mainframes for financial organizations. You can reach himonLinkedIn.
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:
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
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.
Compartments to isolate and control access. Can also be used to analyze cost and assign budget.
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.
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.
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
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)
Understand about Load Balancer. This is highly available and scalable resource
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
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
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.
I have completed AWS certified Solutions architect associate exam recently in my first attempt.
Because of working, I studied only during in my week offs and completed this certification in 4 months. I took cloud guru Ryan Kroonenburg, AWS architect course from udemy and started learning it, spent hardly 6 hours in my weekly offs. The Content is good with detailed explanations. I have maintained my own notes while preparing along with practice labs which had helped in ease of this certification.
Completed Ryan Kroonenburg course in 2 months, after that I took Jon bonso practice exams from udemy. These practice exams are bit tough and all are scenario based questions on resiliency, fault tolerant, security practices etc. I have practiced it more where I felt lag, I have noted it in my own notes, concentrated more on my mistakes during these exams.
After 2 months of these practice exams,lab preparations. I have decided to enroll a date for the final AWS certified exam. honestly, the main certified exam is not tough at all and it is easy with some moderate level questions compared to the tough practice exams.
From my learning experience over this certification, if you learn and practice more the final AWS exam will be very easy to crack it in first attempt.
All the best and keep always learning!!
You can contact me in my LinkedIn profile, if you require any suggestions over this exam.
(OCI) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate | Tips on how to pass OCI Architect Associate Exam
...Read More
Haman Sharma
Docker Certified Associate | My Docker Certified Associate journey
Hey there!
Here is a little summary of my Docker Certified Associate journey. I hope it will be helpful!
The Docker certified Associate Exam is not an easy one. As you probably know, Docker is a really vast product and knowing everything is unfortunately not possible. Even more when Kubernetes is a part of the exam. Thus, here are some recommendations that, hopefully, will help you to win some time:
1. Find the proper course for you. I've followed Zeal's Vora course on Udemy and had no prior Docker knowledge. However, feel free to choose another one. Just make sure that the course you choose contains all the required sections of the exam (Kubernetes in particular).
2. Set an expected end date for training. As this is a long journey, it's better to plan when it will end. Set an expected end date for training and try to stick to it.
3. Read Docker and Kubernetes documentation. Among all the different courses and practice tests you will encounter, there is a high probability that something will be unclear or wrong. If you have any doubt about the accuracy of the info, always take Docker/Kubernetes documentations as a reference.
4. Do the practice tests. Following a course is nice, but doing the practice tests is better. Run the commands on your computer and check the results. This will help you to memorize the outputs.
5. Register for a Docker Entreprise Trial. Use the 1-month free Docker Enterprise Trial to practice even more. This is a part of the exam. I would recommend starting the trial after having some Docker knowledge.
6. Check the DCA Study Guide. Check the guide and make sure that you know all the required info. There are also some sample test questions that you can use to practice.
7. Practice, practice and ... practice. The previous Udemy course contains 5 sample tests (one of 26 questions and four of 50 questions). Do the practice tests, write your incorrect answers and check the results using Docker/Kubernetes documentations if you have any doubt.
8. Practice for the DOMC questions. As DOMC questions are not supported by Udemy, what I would recommend is practicing until you're capable of giving the answer by only reading the question. You shouldn't need to read the answers to find the correct one.
9. Read Kubernetes documentation. The previous course I was referring to contains some Kubernetes notions. However, unfortunately, at the moment the sample tests don't. What I would recommend here is checking the Docker guide and try to understand which parts of Kubernetes are valuable. Then, a good practice would be to read the proper sections in Kubernetes documentation directly.
10. Schedule your exam. When you think you're ready, schedule your exam and prepare a little training schedule for the remaining days.
11. Rest. The day of the exam, practice a little bit but also rest. It's not a few hours that is going to change the fate of the exam.
12. Celebrate. Congratulations, you've passed the exam! Take the time to celebrate and rest a little bit before moving to the next one. :)
......Read More
Fatine
AWS Professional DevOps Engineer | My experience with AWS DEVOPS Engineer Exam
To start with ....
The test is super hard. The exam is long and tiring (3 to 3.5 hours) with 75 scenario-based and problem-based questions with long answers which all seem to be correct. After 35–40 questions your brain starts melting down and it hurts when you try to think and analyze.
I was supposed to give it by last DEC-2019 but it was postponed due to my personal loss (I lost my daughter and she passed away with pulmonary hypertension) so kept on reading on and off but am dedicated to this as I love being ‘AWSome’ always .. Finally, I took the exam in APR 28th, 2020 and passed.
Used to read the question and use paper and pencil to draw a rough architecture and focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach to the right answer or at least have a 50% chance of getting it right.
The only thing is it is brain drainer and need lot of patience and calm down during the exam not to lose focus. Fun to be challenge and accept them so that you will be surprised with outcome that you produce.
It covers a lot of concepts and services related to Automation, Deployments, Disaster Recovery, HA, Monitoring, Logging and Troubleshooting. It also covers security and compliance related topics. I did score well out of all the 6 domains except one domain (Incident and event response- Needs an improvement) and rest all are meet competencies. The % of scored domains are:
SDLC automation (21.5%), Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code (18.5%), Monitoring &Logging (15.4%), Policies & Standards (10.8%), Incident and event response (18.5%), HA,DR section(15.7%)
Be sure to cover the following topics
Whitepapers are the key to understand Deployments and DR
· Blue Green Deployments
· Disaster Recovery
· Architecting for the Cloud: Best Practices
· Building Fault-Tolerant Applications on AWS
Management Tools
· DevOps professional exam cannot be cleared without the knowledge of this topics
· Deep dive into CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks
· Very important to understand CloudFormation vs Elastic Beanstalk vs OpsWorks
CloudFormation
· Have in-depth understand of CloudFormation concepts
· Know how to indicate completion of events using CloudFormation helper scripts.
· Understand CloudFormation deployment strategies esp. rolling and replacing update with AutoScaling and update of launch configuration
· Elastic Beanstalk
· Understand Elastic Beanstalk overall – Applications, Versions and Environments
· Understand Elastic Beanstalk Deployment Strategies esp. the rolling, immutable and blue/green deployment
OpsWorks
· Understand OpsWorks overall – stacks, layers, recipes
· Understand OpsWorks Lifecycle events esp. the Configure event and how it can be used.
· Understand OpsWorks Deployment Strategies
Development Tools
· Unlike the previous DevOps Engineer – Professional exam, the latest pattern has a heavy focus on the Developer tools and be sure to deep dive into them
· Understand CodePipepline, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CodeBuild and their uses cases
· CodePipeline
· Understand how to build Pipelines and integration with other Code* services
· Understand CodePipeline pipeline structure (Hint : run builds parallelly using runorder)
· Understand how to configure notifications on events and failures
Monitoring & Governance tools
· Very important to understand AWS CloudWatch vs AWS CloudTrail vs AWS Config
· Very important to understand Trust Advisor vs Systems manager vs AWS Inspector
· Know Personal Health Dashboard & Service Health Dashboard
· CloudWatch
· Deep dive CloudWatch
· Understand CloudWatch logs
· Understand CloudWatch Subscription Filters and its integration with other services.
· Understand CloudWatch Events
· Networking, Security, Storage and Database domain areas too
Resources:
aws.training website, AWS whitepapers, blogs, webinars, practice tests and Udemy courses too. Pluralsight.com is also free sometimes they give us free month. good to read those. You need to practice and draw the underlaying architecture components for every scenario which will solve the puzzle faster.
......Read More
aruna kumar
(OCI) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate | How to prepare for OCI 2019 Architect Associate exam
How to prepare for OCI 2019 Architect Associate exam
I recently prepared for an passed the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 1Z0-1072-OCI-Architect-Associate-2019 exam. The format and the content for the exam is available on Oracle’s education site –
Become an OCI architect Associate
I would absolutely recommend a refresh of the OCI fundamentals before jumping into the OCI architect course.
I went through the course once at 2x speed and captured most of the information in a word document. The exam is supposedly not as difficult as any other AWS or GCP associate level exams. I am listing the main topics of the preparation course and some of the key elements you should understand and remember before you take the #FREE exam offered by Oracle.
All resources shared during the course are available at this training site location - OCI Architect Associate Resources
Getting Started with OCI
To better understand the OCI interface as well as all the services please review the Infrastructure as a service documentation available here at OCI IAAS Documentation site and services availability across regions across the world.
Lets now focus on individual services and some of the focus areas to remember
1. Identify and Access Management
· IAM – There are mainly 4 verbs used in IAM to define a policy and they are inspect, read, use and manage.
o Inspect – provided the ability to list resources
o Read – Includes inspect and ability to get user specified metadata/actual resource
o Use – Includes read + ability to work with existing resources (the actions vary by resource type). This verb does not allow the ability to create or delete any type of resource.
o Manage – Includes all permissions for the resource
· IAM-Policies
o The most common format of an IAM policy is listed below –
Allow to in
where
The subject can be an IAM user, group, resource group etcetera
Please pay special attention to managing users, groups, Dynamic groups and network resources. You must specially understand that if you want to provide a specific role to a compute instance, you need to attach a dynamic group to it so that it is identified as “principal” and it can make API calls against other services on OCI.
· IAM-Compartment – Compartments are another way to manage your resources by relating them together and accessed by groups that are given permission.
o It must be understood that each resource can belong to one and only one compartment. However, resources can be shared across compartments.
o Resources can also be moved across compartments once they have been created.
o Compartments can have sub compartments that can go six level deep.
§ COMP1 > COMP2 > COMP3 > COMP4 > COMP5 > COMP6
§ These sub compartments inherit access permissions from compartments higher up the hierarchy
o When an IAM policy is being created, it must be specified which compartment to attach it to.
· IAM Policy Inheritance and Attachment
o Understand how IAM policy inheritance work when resources are moved across compartments.
· IAM-Tags
o Tagging is an additional method to identify/categorize your services inside your compartments.
o Free form and custom tags are allowed under OCI.
2. OCI Networking
It should be emphasized that you must have understanding of creating public and private networks and how all private networks use CIDR ranges identified under RFC 1918. The major networking components of OCI networking is listed below -
o VIRTUAL CLOUD NETWORK (VCN) and Subnets
§ Default route table
§ Default Security list
§ Default DHCP options
o VNIC
o PRIVATE IP
o PUBLIC IP
o IPV6
o DYNAMIC ROUTING GATEWAY (DRG) – Connect on-premises networking and use it to peer VCNs across regions with remote peering gateway. Please understand that DRG connections are always private when used either with Fastconnect for in premises or with RPC across regions to pair VCNs.
o INTERNET GATEWAY
o NETWORK ADDRESS TRANSLATION (NAT) GATEWAY
o SERVICE GATEWAY – These provide a way to connect resources in your VCN to other manager services like OCI object storage.
o LOCAL PEERING GATEWAY (LPG)
o REMOTE PEERING CONNECTION (RPC) – Understand the user dynamic routing gateway (DRG) with on premises versus using DRG with RPC in a multi-region configuration.
o ROUTE TABLES
o SECURITY RULES
§ Difference between security lists and network security groups.
o DHCP OPTIONS
o FastConnect
o VPN Connect – Please do take a moment to understand how to establish cost effective and redundant connectivity with OCI using VPN connect and DRG. I found this example very interesting to read and understand.
Overview of connectivity options on OCI
3. Load Balancing on OCI
o Concepts of load balancing on OCI
§ Service discovery
§ Health Check
§ Algorithm
o Benefits of load balancing on OCI
§ Fault tolerance and high availability
§ Scale
§ Naming Abstraction
o Concepts of a public load balancer
§ Listener
§ Backend server
§ Load balancing policy
§ Round Robin
§ IP Hash (sticky connections)
§ Least Connection
§ Back end sets
§ Health Checks – this is a test to confirm the availability of backend servers. Health check is activated for backends, backend sets and overall load balancer.
o Concept of private load balancer
4. Compute on OCI
o Bare Metal
o Virtual Machines
o Dedicated VM Hosts
o Creating Custom Images of Boot Volumes
§ Pre-built OCI Images
§ Custom Images
§ Bring your own image (BYOI)
o Images Import/Export
§ Emulation Mode
§ Para virtualized Mode
§ Native Mode
o Boot Volumes
o Cloning a boot volume – Please ensure that you check out the difference between boot volume backups and clones and how they are mutually exclusive to each other.
o Instance Configuration and pools – configure and manage a set of instances/images together.
o Autoscaling configurations
o Instance Metadata
o Instance Life Cycle – start/stop/reboot/terminate
5. Storage on OCI
o Object Storage
§ Using Object Lifecycle
§ Using Multipart uploads
§ Using pre-authenticated requests
o Archive Storage
o File Storage – Please read through the concepts of creating/managing files systems, managing mount targets, snapshots , using export options (to provide granular access to a file system mounted on same mount target and accessed by two different clients/instances) etc. I found this complete section extremely useful.
o Block volume storage
§ Volume Groups
§ Attaching a volume
§ Resizing of block volumes
§ Block Volume Backups
§ Cloning a block volume
§ Volume Groups
o Local NVMe Storage
6. Databases on OCI
o Exadata cloud
o Exadata DB Systems
o Bare Metal and VB DB Systems
o Autonomous Databases
§ Autonomous transaction processing
v Managing Users
v Backup and restore
v Where does tnsames.ora reside -It resides in oracle home\NETWORK]\ADMIN directory
v How to load data into Autonomous databases with SQL*loader & Data Pump
§ Autonomous data warehouse
v Loading data on ADW using SQL*loader & data pump & OCI object storage
Some additional resources that I think are extremely useful to review that were not covered in the course are listed below –
§ Using Data Guard for database services
§ Data Flow
§ Data Safe
§ Data Science
§ Data Science
§ Oracle Audit
§ OCI DNS Service
§ OCI Traffic Management
§ OCI Vault
I want to add a few tips from my experience during the exam –
§ I noticed most of the answers are in the question, so if you are not completely confident, select what you think is right, mark the question to come back for review and then revisit it as soon as you are reviewing your exam.
§ You will notice as you traverse through rest of the tests, some of the questions that follow latter may also have answer to what you could not answer earlier.
If you are interested in other cloud certifications and how to prepare for them, check out our website.
More from same author
§ Cloud 101 for mainframe developer
§ Practical Comparisons of DynamoDB and VSAM
AUTHOR: Mukesh Sharma is a multi and hybrid cloud enthusiast with a bias for building robust hybrid cloud systems around mainframes for financial organizations. You can reach him on LinkedIn.
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Mukesh Sharma
(OCI) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations | Passed OCI Foundation with 8 hours of study
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:
That's it folks. I hope you found this helpful. Message me or follow me on LindkedIn if you have any questions.
Haman Sharma
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Haman Sharma
AWS Associate Solutions Architect | AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT
I have completed AWS certified Solutions architect associate exam recently in my first attempt.
Because of working, I studied only during in my week offs and completed this certification in 4 months. I took cloud guru Ryan Kroonenburg, AWS architect course from udemy and started learning it, spent hardly 6 hours in my weekly offs. The Content is good with detailed explanations. I have maintained my own notes while preparing along with practice labs which had helped in ease of this certification.
Completed Ryan Kroonenburg course in 2 months, after that I took Jon bonso practice exams from udemy. These practice exams are bit tough and all are scenario based questions on resiliency, fault tolerant, security practices etc. I have practiced it more where I felt lag, I have noted it in my own notes, concentrated more on my mistakes during these exams.
After 2 months of these practice exams,lab preparations. I have decided to enroll a date for the final AWS certified exam. honestly, the main certified exam is not tough at all and it is easy with some moderate level questions compared to the tough practice exams.
From my learning experience over this certification, if you learn and practice more the final AWS exam will be very easy to crack it in first attempt.
All the best and keep always learning!!
You can contact me in my LinkedIn profile, if you require any suggestions over this exam.
(nagaraj pokala)
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Nagaraju pokala