Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate study guide
OCI Architect Associate · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate credential is aimed at cloud and infrastructure engineers who design and operate solutions on OCI rather than simply administering a single service. It sits between foundational cloud knowledge and professional-level architecture work: you are expected to reason about tenancy structure, network topology, compute sizing, storage selection, database placement, resilience, and cost. The OCI Architect Associate study guide has 7 sections and about 2,394 words.
01Identity and Access Management, Compartments, and Tenancy Governance
IAM questions check whether you can turn an access requirement into a policy statement that actually works at runtime, and whether you treat compartments as both permission boundaries and cost/quota boundaries. Expect policy inheritance, dynamic groups, federation, and least-privilege scoping.
368 words, about 2 min02Networking: VCNs, Subnets, Gateways, Routing, Security Lists, NSGs, and Connectivity
Networking scenarios ask you to prove that a described traffic path actually works end to end. Marks hinge on route tables plus gateways plus security rules being consistent - a single missing piece breaks the path.
348 words, about 2 min03Compute: Instances, Shapes, Images, Autoscaling, and Instance Configuration
Compute questions test shape selection against a workload profile, image and boot-volume lifecycle, and how instance configurations, pools, and autoscaling interact. Autoscaling behaviour questions are common because they combine several resources.
348 words, about 2 min04Storage: Block Volumes, Object Storage, File Storage, and Archive Tiers
Storage questions test matching a workload to the right service, then getting the details right: AD scoping, performance tiers, lifecycle rules, and retrieval behaviour. Cost-oriented scenarios often ask you to tier data automatically.
338 words, about 2 min05Databases: Autonomous Database, DB Systems, and Migration Options
Database questions test whether you pick the right managed service for a requirement and understand the operational limits of each: who patches, how you connect, how backups work, and which migration tool meets a downtime target. Autonomous Database runs on shared Exadata (serverless) or dedicated Exadata infrastructure.
342 words, about 2 min06High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and Backup Strategy Design
This domain tests design under explicit targets. Given an RTO and an RPO, can you choose the right topology and backup mechanism, and do you know which failures each layer survives?
325 words, about 2 min07Observability, Cost Management, and Operational Best Practices
Questions here test whether you can observe a running system and control its cost using native services: metrics and alarms, log routing, tagging for chargeback, and budgets and quotas that constrain spend. Monitoring emits platform metrics for free; agent-based metrics require the Unified Monitoring Agent on the instance.
325 words, about 2 min