Announcing Oracle University Hands-On Performance Exam certification, OCI Architect Professional

During last year’s Oracle Cloud World in Las Vegas, Nevada, Oracle University (OU) successfully tested the beta phase of the new Hands-On Performance Exam (HPE) for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2023 Architect Certified Professional certification (1Z0-997-23). Over 20 engineers certified with the beta release.

It is my pleasure to communicate to you that the official version has been released June 1st. From now on every Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Architect Professional certification will be granted to successful test takers that clear the Hands-On Performance Exam.

How does Hands-On Performance testing work?

For the previous version of this certification, Oracle University (OU) recommended at least one year of hands-on experience prior to taking the test. This recommendation is emphasized more strongly in the HPE test because the exam includes scenarios that will be solved by performing several tasks on an OU provided OCI tenancy.

Requirements

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

Expanding the example, if your scenario requires adding a vNIC to a compute instance that you will be creating in a private subnet on your tenancy. Creating that compute instance is one task, placing it on the private subnet is another task, and adding the vNIC is a third task. If you create the compute instance on a public subnet and then add the second vNIC to it; then you will score two good tasks out of the three.

In addition to the hands-on scenarios, the test will be complemented with multiple choice questions (MCQs). The number of questions will vary from test to test; it will depend on the complexity of the Hands-On scenarios you will receive. The total score will be composed of the successful tasks you complete out of your scenarios, and of the number of correct answers to the MCQs. There is no penalty for wrong answers, nor for wrong or incomplete steps.

Getting the most out of Hands-On Labs

We have created a learning path that is complemented with labs that are similar in complexity to the scenarios that you will be receiving on the Hands-On Performance Exam. In these labs we present a complex scenario, and the steps you need to solve it. Remember that having hands-on experience is a must requirement, the labs will enhance your hands-on skills.

We also included an exam preparation lesson where we also cover scenarios similar in complexity. These lessons list the solution steps (tasks) that are needed for solving each scenario, and then we access an OCI tenancy and configure the solution step by step.

In the learning path you will find the prerequisites that we recommend before enrolling, we basically recommend that you review all the topics that you saw during your studies for the Associate level of the OCI Architect certification, as a refresher. Especially if you earned this certification a few of years ago.

Learning Path Topics

These are the topics in the OCI Architect Professional certification learning path that will help you prepare for this certification test:

• Design Scalable and elastic Resilient solutions for High Availability and Disaster Recovery
• Design Cloud-Native, Microservices, and Serverless Architecture
• Deliver infrastructure as a code
• Design, implement, and operate Oracle Database Services
• Design for hybrid and multi-cloud architectures
• Migrate workloads, Databases, and data to OCI

Live Sessions

To complement the learning path, we are running two weekly Live Preparation Sessions for the OCI 2023 Architect Professional, and for all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure certifications. For OCI Architect professional these sessions will run from June 7th to August 30th  at 8:00 AM PDT, and 11:00 AM India Standard Time. My colleague Samvit Mishra and I are looking forward to seeing you there!

We know that this is an important certification for OCI architects; it is the next level to the OCI Associate and we want to offer an exciting challenge that will validate your knowledge, skills and hands-on experience in OCI; and we hope that you enjoy the learning experience as much as we did design it.

We now offer two additional HPE certifications, you can learn more about them in OU’s MyLearn portal and in the Oracle University Learning Community.

Happy testing!