My personal recommendations to get the OCI Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate certification

On December 30th, I achieved the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate certification after passing the exam OCI Architect 2021 Associate [1Z0-1072-21], just 3 month after even knowing that Oracle had their own Cloud computing offer, and here i plan to write my personal recommendations so you can prepare to this exam.

First of all, you need to know that the exam is not a walk in the meadow, most of the question has two or three possible options but only one is the best, another questions are related so you know that if you have one wrong the other one is wrong to (Or yo can play varying the answers and see what happens).

With certifications, my personal recommendation is to completely avoid exam dumps, Maybe you will find the answers but you are not learning and something even worst, you will lower the appreciation level for that certification and will affect people that studied for their tests.

Now, let start:

• Open an OCI free account, instruction here. You will need to practice, practice, practice. Or at least get to know where the services are located and what are the options requested to configure them. Also, The web console is constantly under development, features are added or updated.

• Start by studying for the Oracle Foundation certification and take the OCI Foundations 2021 Associate [1Z0-1085-21] test. The training videos under Oracle University are well explained, and contain all the information and examples you will need. You can start HERE

• After achieving the foundation certification, take the trainings for the Associate level, again, the video trainings from Oracle are complete and contain all the information you required for the test. Training videos can be found HERE

• Follow up the practice videos in your own account, nothing will help you more than doing it yourself.

• Read the services FAQs pages, this will provide in depth information about compute instances, storage services, database services, etc. Some questions can be easily resolved knowing the information that appears on those resources.

  • Compute Service FAQs
  • Block Volumes FAQs
  • Object Storage FAQs
  • VCN FAQs
  • Autonomous Database FAQs

• Exposure is important, besides practicing you can also see the youtube videos from Oracle learning channel, they developed an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Certified Architect Associate - 1Z0-1072 Exam Preparation video path that contains useful information for day to day job.

• Personally, I like to complement my learning with some reading so i bought the following book Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate All-In-One Exam Guide (Exam 1z0-1072). This book was developed for a previous version of the exam, but provides some useful commands for day to day job, that could also help you understand some concepts. Example, to upload a multipart file with 5 parallel threads:
  
  oci os object put -ns <object-storage-namespaces> -bn <bucket-name> --file <filepath/filename> --name <object_name_on_bucket> --part-size <size in MB> --parallel-upload-count 5

• Take notes, this is important, you can write those notes on paper or use software, i took notes in a txt file using my IDE. Those notes can help you focus on the important subjects.

• Last, but not least, go through the Practice Exam: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Certification it contains useful information, and a couple of question can go to the final test or similar ones.

NOTE also a useful, but not needed resource are the blogs, specially the architecture related posts. This is not mandatory but it can provide you with extra knowledge.

I hope this help you to achieve this certification. Good Luck.