OCI Architect Associate study guide
OCI Architect Associate · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2024 Architect Associate credential is Oracle's foundational architecture certification for OCI. It is aimed at cloud engineers, solution architects, and administrators who design or operate workloads on Oracle Cloud and want to demonstrate that they can assemble identity, networking, compute, storage, and database services into a coherent, secure, well-governed architecture. The OCI Architect Associate study guide has 8 sections and about 2,584 words.
01Identity and Access Management
OCI IAM answers two questions: who (the principal) and what (the policy). Principals are users, groups, dynamic groups (instances and other resources matched by rules such as instance.compartment.id = 'ocid1.compartment...' ), and service principals.
283 words, about 1 min02Networking
A VCN is a regional CIDR block subdivided into regional subnets, each with its own route table and security lists. Traffic control has three layers: route tables decide where packets go (internet gateway, NAT gateway, service gateway, DRG, LPG), security lists filter at the subnet level, and network security groups (NSGs) filter at the VNIC level.
317 words, about 2 min03Compute
Compute choices start with shape: standard (general purpose), flexible (choose OCPUs and memory within a range), DenseIO (local NVMe), GPU, and Ampere A1 (Arm). On x86, one OCPU is one physical core exposed as two vCPUs; on Arm A1, one OCPU equals one vCPU - a classic exam trap.
276 words, about 1 min04Storage
OCI storage splits into block, file, object, and archive. Block volumes are network-attached disks for instances: boot volumes and additional data volumes, with performance tiers driven by VPUs (lower cost, balanced, higher performance, ultra-high performance) plus backups, clones, cross-region replication, and cross-AD replication.
285 words, about 1 min05Database Services
Oracle offers Autonomous Database (ATP for transactions, ADW for analytics, plus JSON and APEX variants), co-managed Base Database systems, MySQL HeatWave, NoSQL, and Exadata. Autonomous Database comes serverless (shared infrastructure, automatic scaling, ECPU or OCPU billing) or dedicated (Exadata infrastructure in your compartment with private endpoints).
273 words, about 1 min06Security and Compliance
Security and compliance spans preventive and detective controls. Preventive: IAM least privilege, security zones (compartment-level deny policies that block risky actions such as making buckets public), security lists and NSGs, WAF, network firewall, and encryption with Vault - customer-managed keys in a vault, plus secrets.
285 words, about 1 min07Governance, Monitoring, and Observability
Governance is about organizing and controlling cost and access at scale. Compartments are the primary boundary for policies, quotas, budgets, and cost reporting; design a hierarchy that mirrors the organization and keep the root tenancy clean.
566 words, about 3 min08Migration, Hybrid, and Architecture Best Practices
Migration and hybrid questions test tool selection and topology. For data movement: OCI Data Transfer service (disk appliance or device) for very large offline moves, FastConnect or site-to-site VPN for ongoing connectivity, rsync-style tools for file and object copies, and Database Migration Service or Zero Downtime Migration for databases.
299 words, about 1 min