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 Miranda Swenson of Cintra Software and Services.

Miranda is a long-time techie with a passion for using technology to solve business challenges. She’s worked in IT for the past 20 years as a technical consultant, presales engineer, and solution architect. Over the past three years, she has focused on cloud technology and hybrid cloud solution architecture. Miranda is currently working as a Principal Solution Architect at Cintra Software and Services. In her spare time, she enjoys playing with her pets, learning Spanish, traveling, and hula hooping!

Here Miranda shares some of her key learnings and tips.

Greg: How did you prepare for the exam?

Miranda: Part of my role at Cintra is building customer workshops, so we can show our customers how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) works. I had been putting together labs that included a lot of the topics I found on the exam, such as the grand tour of the console and how the networking works. By putting together labs based on the GitHub account, actually using OCI and learning it well enough so that I could share it with other people really helped prepare me for the certification.

Also reading the online documentation, about Terraform, and GitHub and the cloud documentation all helped me prepare. I found that working with the environment was extremely beneficial.

Greg: How is life after getting certified?

Miranda: I’ve had a whole lot of people checking out my profile on LinkedIn. My company is happy because getting certified has helped with our partner recognition.

Taking the exam helped reinforce what I knew and also helped identify where my gaps are. I wanted to get a 100% on the exam, but I still have some things to learn. I found it to be a good way to see what you know and what you don’t.

My certification helps when working with customers. It shows that I can bring solid solutions and know some of the “gotchas” that can prevent a smooth implementation. It helps demonstrate my level of knowledge. And being introduced as a certified architect builds my credibility.

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

Miranda: When a lot of people think about Oracle, they think database. This is NOT a database exam, it’s an infrastructure exam. If you’re coming from an Oracle software perspective, whether it’s middleware or database, you’re going to have to know things you never thought you’d need to know. You’re going to have to know networking, hardware, and storage. Networking is a huge component. You also have to know the orchestration tools, such as Terraform. Get in and play with it. Get a trial account.

In general, I felt that this was a good exam. It felt meaningful and tested the things you need to know.

 

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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.