Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Associate Exam Tips and Tricks

Oracle cloud is one of the biggest clouds in the cloud industry. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure known as OCI. Oracle is providing opportunity to learn and complete certification in the various era as well as OCI.

OCI Foundations Associate, is the foundation course to understand OCI fundamentals and cloud concepts and one of the easiest exams from Oracle. For this course, don’t need to hand on experience because most of the part for this course and exam are theoretical base.
The exam is taken by Pearson. Time is 105 minutes for 60 questions and passing score is 68%. Questions pattern are multiple choice and most of the question has more than one answers. Most important thing is no partial marking is available in the Pearson exam system. So, every question needs 100% correct answer.

Oracle is providing very good quality video materials to learn OCI and complete the certification. Videos are well explained, and it is very easy to understand the way Oracle explained. But the main point is, it is not possible to understand and pass the exam or get a good score if one is only watching the video but don’t check the documentation from OCI. To complete the certification, it is better to focus in OCI documentation as well as video materials. It is mandatory to focus on documentation not only to complete the course but also for better idea about Oracle Infrastructure for working in OCI.

In the video lecture, instructor is providing the basic information about Oracle. After every lecture, check the documentation and try to skim the whole page according to the lecture topic. Below is the list of tips to complete the exam according the lecture videos:

1. Getting Started with OCI: In this video section, it is giving the idea about Oracle, overall cloud concepts and OCI architecture. From this section related question, how resources are created and managed, the basic idea about cloud (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) and Oracle architecture (region, AD, FD and so on). How Oracle architecture is providing the high availability and so on.
2. Core OCI Services: This is actually the main section for this course. A very big amount of questions is coming from this chapter. Which compute service is providing what type of facilities and which is the best way to use according to the application or user needs. How Oracle is supporting scaling and Oracle Kubernetes Engine and so on. According to the Storage Service, what type of storage services are Oracle providing and the use case of real life. The comparison of all storages is very important to understand storage services. Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) is one of the most important part from the OCI Network Services. The functionality of all gateways and how peering is working for OCI are key topics from this one. Real example of Load Balancer (LB) is also important part. From OCI IAM, authenticate and authorization is the key factor with policy and also compartment basic concepts of working. OCI DB options and DB system are main points in the OCI Database Services. Which DB is using according to the real life scenarios and Comparison between multiple options in the DB should be focused for exam as well as work in OCI. This is one of the key chapters to focus from this module.
3. The last chapter is OCI security, Pricing, Billing and Support. Most of the people are neglecting this chapter but 6/7 questions are available from this topic. So, be focused on this chapter before going to seat for exam. This chapter is also important to know which services are free and which is don’t need pay when it is shutdown. From this chapter better to focus on free tier and always free tier of Oracle and the services are provided by both tiers. How support is working during free tier also important. Also, focus on documents Question and answer part for free tiers and supports. Pricing and billing are providing the real-life example to think about Oracle. For this topic, I am highly recommended to check OCI documents to understand overall concepts.

This is all about OCI Foundation Associates exam. It is not very difficult, but it is very conceptual exam. Before going to seat in the exam, try to solve the mock exam provided by Oracle and also keep it mind you will get some common questions in different way from mock exam if you are lucky enough.
Good luck 

Useful Link list:

1. Video Course: https://learn.oracle.com/ols/learning-path/understand-oci-foundations/35644/75258
2. OCI documents: https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/GSG/Concepts/baremetalintro.htm
3. Q&A for Free Tier: https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/faq.htm