OCI Foundations Associate key terms

A geographically separate area where Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources are hosted, made up of one or more availability domains. Customers choose a region to place resources close to their users and to meet data-residency requirements.

The division of security duties between Oracle and the customer. Oracle secures the physical infrastructure and managed services; the customer secures their data, identities, and configurations.

One or more isolated data centers within a region, each with independent power, cooling, and network. Spreading resources across availability domains protects workloads from a single data center failure.

A grouping of hardware within a single availability domain. Distributing instances across fault domains reduces the chance that a hardware failure affects all copies of a workload.

The isolated, secure partition of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure assigned to an organization when it signs up. It holds all of that customer's users, compartments, and resources.

A unique identifier Oracle assigns to every resource, such as an instance, compartment, or user. OCIDs are used in API calls, policies, and command-line commands to reference a specific resource.

A command-line tool for creating and managing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources. It authenticates with an API signing key or an instance principal and calls the same APIs as the console.

A private, software-defined network that you create in a region. It has its own IP address range and contains subnets, route tables, and gateways that control how traffic flows.

A contiguous range of IP addresses within a virtual cloud network, tied to a single availability domain or to the whole region. Subnets can be public or private and hold resources such as compute instances.

A virtual router that lets resources in a public subnet send and receive traffic directly to and from the internet, using their public IP addresses.

A gateway that lets instances in a private subnet start outbound connections to the internet while blocking unsolicited inbound connections, so those resources stay unreachable from outside.

A gateway that provides private access from a virtual cloud network to supported Oracle services, such as Object Storage, without sending traffic over the public internet.

A set of rules attached to a subnet that decides where network traffic is sent, for example to an internet gateway or a NAT gateway, based on destination IP ranges.

A set of inbound and outbound firewall rules applied at the subnet level. Every instance in that subnet is subject to the same rules.

A set of firewall rules applied to a chosen group of virtual network interface cards rather than to a whole subnet, allowing finer control of traffic between specific instances.

A virtual router that connects a virtual cloud network to on-premises networks through a site-to-site VPN or FastConnect, and can also connect multiple VCNs to each other.

A template that defines the number of CPUs, amount of memory, and type of processor for a compute instance. A shape is chosen when an instance is launched.

Durable, network-attached storage that can be attached to a compute instance and behaves like a local disk. Volumes can be detached and reattached to other instances.

The block volume that contains the operating system image an instance starts from. It persists after the instance is terminated unless it is explicitly deleted.

A logical container in Object Storage that holds objects such as files, backups, and images. Buckets have a flat structure and a name unique within the tenancy's namespace.

A classification of an Object Storage bucket that sets how often data is expected to be accessed and how quickly it is available, such as Standard, Infrequent Access, and Archive.

A fully managed Oracle database that patches, tunes, scales, and backs itself up automatically. Customers focus on their data and schemas instead of routine administration tasks.

A virtual machine or bare metal database host running Oracle Database in the customer's tenancy, where the customer manages the operating system, patching, and database configuration.

A managed Oracle Exadata platform in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that delivers high performance and availability for demanding database workloads, offered in flexible shapes.

A scheduled backup of a database that Oracle stores for a retention period, allowing the database to be restored to a chosen point in time after a failure or data error.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service that controls who can access which resources and what actions they may perform, using users, groups, compartments, and policies.

A logical container used to organize and isolate resources inside a tenancy. Access is granted per compartment through policies, which makes compartments the basic unit of governance.

A statement written in human-readable syntax that grants a group permission to perform a set of actions on resources in a compartment or in the whole tenancy.

A group whose members are compute instances or other resources that match rules you write, so those resources can be granted access without storing user credentials.

The identity that a compute instance or other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resource uses to call Oracle APIs. Access comes from dynamic group membership rather than from user credentials.

Connecting a tenancy to an external identity provider, such as Microsoft Entra ID or Okta, so users sign in with existing corporate credentials and are mapped to OCI groups.

A sign-in requirement in which a user must provide a second proof of identity beyond a password, such as a one-time code generated by an authenticator app.

A managed service for storing and controlling access to encryption keys and secrets, so applications can encrypt data and retrieve credentials without handling key material directly.

A service that detects risky configurations and suspicious activity in a tenancy, reports them as problems, and can respond automatically using rules you define.

A commitment-based purchasing model in which a customer pays in advance for cloud services and draws down the balance across any eligible Oracle Cloud service.

A billing model in which a customer is charged monthly for the resources actually consumed, with no upfront commitment and no minimum spend.

A set of Oracle Cloud services with usage limits that remain available at no cost for an unlimited time, separate from the time-limited credits given to a new paid account.

A spending threshold defined on a compartment or tenancy that triggers alerts, and optionally automated actions, when forecast or actual costs reach the amount set.

A cap on how much of a resource, such as compute cores, a tenancy can use in a region. Limits can often be raised by submitting a request to Oracle.

A support ticket created in My Oracle Support to ask Oracle for help, request a service limit increase, or report a problem, tracked by a chosen severity level.