As part of our series of interviews with Oracle employees, partners, and customers who have successfully passed the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2018 Architect Associate exam, we recently interviewed Jean Rodrigues of Oracle.

Jean is a Principal IT Consultant working in Oracle’s Managed Cloud Services group, which is a global team that implements, runs, and maintains services for customers who have their workloads fully managed by Oracle. His role includes providing technical leadership and architecting customers’ Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud at Customer workloads.

Greg: Jean, how did you prepare for the certification?

Jean: It was an exciting journey. I’ve been working in cloud for a while. I have followed the development of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because I truly believe it is a great offering from Oracle that will benefit many enterprise customers. When the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate certification launched, I immediately started the preparation by following the learning path published on the exam page. I took the training, went over the documentation, did hands-on exercises, and took the practice exam.

Additionally, I attended Oracle Training, which greatly helped me prepare. The instructor explained the concepts very well and provided valuable real-world examples. I highly recommend that training.

Greg: How long did it take you to prepare for the exam?

Jean: I took around two months to prepare, spending around one hour a day reading and practicing in the environment. I booked the exam through Pearson VUE, showed up 15 minutes earlier, and everything went smoothly.

Greg: How is life after getting certified?

Jean: I received great feedback from management and coworkers on this accomplishment, and I was glad to see that some of them were inspired to prepare to take the exam as well. I’ve helped some of my colleagues with their preparation, and I am pretty sure that soon we will have more Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associates within the team.

Preparing for this exam helped me acquire a huge amount of knowledge in advanced cloud topologies, mainly around networking, distributed computing, and cloud native. It’s just awesome to see how microservices architectures, Docker, Kubernetes, and other cutting-edge patterns and technologies can help customers to innovate. Today I feel confident helping customers design a highly available, high-performance, and cost-effective architecture in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Greg: Any other advice you’d like to share?

Jean: Stay focused and have fun. As I like to say, it is not about the credential you earn, it is about all the learning and expertise you will acquire down the road. The hands-on practices using a trial account help tremendously.

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If you want to follow Jean’s advice, go to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2018 Architect Associate page to learn more about training materials, courses, and to register for your exam.

Greg Hyman
Principal Program Manager, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Certification
greg.hyman@oracle.com
Twitter: @GregoryHyman
LinkedIn: GregoryRHyman

 

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Other blogs in the How to Successfully Prepare for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2018 Architect Exam series are listed under Greg’s blog page.