We are excited to announce that the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) 2024 Architect Professional Certification and course is now available.

The OCI Architect Professional certification gives you a competitive edge in the industry and is one of the most sought-after certifications in OCI, with hundreds of thousands of learners already enrolled and certified. For the 2024 release, we have made significant updates, as detailed in this post.

Evolution of Cloud Architect Skills

The role of the cloud architect has undergone significant evolution in recent years and our certifications and skilling programs have been meticulously designed to mirror this expanded scope of expertise. As shown below, our architect certifications and courses are categorized into two broad segments: Generalists and Specialists. 

Generalist and Specialist Cloud Architects

 

OCI generalist cloud architects boast comprehensive knowledge across core OCI services, including compute, storage, networking, database, security, cloud-native, and automation technologies. Meanwhile, specialist cloud architects are distinguished by their proficiency in designing hybrid and multicloud architectures and in migrating workloads, data, and databases to OCI.

In this framework, OCI Architect Associate certification focuses on the core OCI Primitives – Identity, Networking, Compute, and Storage. We recommend beginning your cloud journey with the OCI Architect Associate certification to acquire essential knowledge and skills pertaining to these core OCI primitives. Subsequently, you can advance your expertise by pursuing the OCI Architect Professional certification, thereby deepening your understanding of OCI services.

OCI Architect Professional and Associate

 

Course Outline

As mentioned above, as a professional level solution architect you are expected to fully understand cloud architecture principles that includes expertise on High Availability, Disaster Recovery, Cloud-Native services, Security, Multicloud and Hybrid environments. Let me quickly touch on the changes we made for the 2024 version of this course.

The OCI 2024 Architect Professional Course is structured into several key modules, each focusing on critical aspects of cloud architecture:

Module 1: Architect High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solutions
Kick off your journey with a deep dive into designing high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions. The primary focus will be on the Full Stack Disaster Recovery service, ensuring you can maintain business continuity in any situation.

Module 2: Architect Cloud-Native Solutions
Learn the fundamentals of containerization and explore the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry, Container Instances, and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). Additionally, gain hands-on experience with Functions and API Gateway to build scalable and efficient applications.

Module 3: Implement Infrastructure as Code
Master Terraform commands and delve into the Resource Manager service to streamline and manage your OCI resources effectively.

Module 4: Architect, Implement and Operate databases in OCI
Discover how to implement and operate databases in OCI. This module covers the Base Database service and Autonomous Databases, providing you with the expertise to manage and optimize database solutions within OCI.

Module 5: Architect Security Solutions
Security is Job Zero at OCI. As a cloud architect, it is crucial to understand OCI’s comprehensive security service offerings. This module covers essential services such as OCI Bastion, Network Firewall, Certificates, Web Application Firewall, and Key Management Service (KMS), ensuring you can design secure cloud environments.

Module 6: Architect Multicloud and Hybrid Solutions
Learn to design and implement seamless multicloud and hybrid solutions. This module explores OCI-Azure Interconnect, Oracle Database@Azure, and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, providing you with the knowledge to integrate OCI with other cloud providers and on-premises environments.

Module 7: Migrate Workloads to OCI
Migration is a critical aspect of cloud architecture. This module covers Oracle Cloud Migrations and the processes involved in migrating data and databases to OCI, ensuring minimal disruption and efficient transitions.

Module 8: Architect Observability Solutions
Conclude your training with a focus on observability. Learn to implement comprehensive monitoring and logging solutions to maintain the health and performance of your OCI environments.

Refresher Lessons and Advanced Architectures

We offer refresher lessons on Identity and Access Management (IAM), Networking, Compute, and Storage, providing a quick overview of the essential topics you should be familiar with before taking this course. In addition to the refresher lessons, the course features detailed Reference Architectures focusing on:

  • Security
  • Multicloud Solutions
  • Disaster Recovery (DR)
  • High Availability (HA)

These reference architectures provide best practices and real-world examples to help you design robust, secure, and resilient cloud solutions.

Furthermore, the course includes two in-depth case studies on Cloud-Native and Security services, offering practical insights in implementing these critical aspects of modern cloud architecture.

Hands-on-Labs 

Learning by doing is the simple idea that we are all capable of learning more about something when we perform the action. That is why we have an option of Oracle University Lab where you get an activity Guide with seven (7) hands-on labs.

About the Hands-On Performance Exam

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2024 Architect Professional exam is designed for individuals who have hands-on experience and knowledge to plan, design, implement and operate solutions on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2024 Architect Professional certification is a Hands-on Performance Exam (HPE) that combines hands-on challenges and multiple-choice questions. 

The exam consists of 2 HPE scenarios and 25 multiple-choice questions, to be completed within 90 minutes. Candidates must achieve a minimum score of 65% to pass.

The HPE scenarios require that you read the assignment very carefully and perform tasks that are needed for configuring and solving the challenge presented in these scenarios. The evaluation of the scenario considers every task you performed. For example, if one of your scenarios requires nine tasks, and you successfully configured only seven of them, then you will get credit for the seven tasks you completed.

In addition to the hands-on scenarios, the test consists of multiple-choice questions (MCQs). The total score will be composed of the successful tasks you complete for your scenarios, and the number of correct answers to the MCQs. There is no penalty for wrong answers, nor for wrong or incomplete steps.

We have also included an exam preparation lesson where we cover scenarios in complexity to the HPE scenarios. The solution to these scenarios list the steps (tasks) that are needed for solving each scenario, thereby helping you understand how to solve them on the actual exam. 

Get started today

Begin your learning journey by checking out the following:

We sincerely hope you like the updated course. The OCI team is continuously building and delivering training, integrating feedback, and monitoring user data. If something is broken or not resonating with our users, we want to know. Please feel free to rate this course and leave a detailed review. Specific comments will help us understand what we’re doing well and what we can do differently.

Thanks for reading, and good luck with the course and the certification exam!