OCI Foundations Certified Associate — Preparation Tips

The future is already here, but it’s not evenly distributed — William Gibson

Cloud computing was never meant to be vendor locked, but over the years it certainly is leaning that way. I certainly believe in a multi-hybrid cloud future and almost makes a conscious decision to be at-least aware of various prominent developments and releases from the top 3 (AWS, Azure, GCP) in this space. To be honest, OCI was not even in my radar as I consider it to be a laggard (things may change soon).

With this Corona pandemic sweeping across the world, the folks at Oracle Cloud have pulled out a masterpiece from their DB hat to make the whole training and certifications FREE until 15th August worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Fresh college grads, final year students and people who had just started their career might not have enough monetary resources to pursue a certification and would stand to benefit the most out of this gesture. OCI exams will help in gaining the much needed mind-share in a fierce cloud market and the future potential revenue/marketshare when they join a company to become influencers in their teams. Pure marketing brilliance!

Anyways, I too love learning new things and took this opportunity from Oracle with open hands. Listing below the resources that helped me prepare:

1. The essential video training that I attended was from the official course of OCI which can be accessed here. This close to 4 hours course would be a great starting point to familiarize with OCI specifics.

2. Reading the Exam Preparation Guide will help you understand the concepts, core services, security, compliance, pricing and support features all of which will be tested at a high level for the foundations exam.

3. Solidify your foundation by going through the Level 100 Training on various OCI services. This might be an overkill for the foundations exam, but will do you a world of good if you intend to take their other exams like Architect Associate or Developer Associate

4. Lastly, test your knowledge with a sample practice test

Hope you liked this list of resources that I relied upon and if you found it useful, do show some love by clapping and sharing the same. TIA and best of luck!