Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) specialists, here’s why you should become OCI certified

While every Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) professional should aspire to get OIC certified, in this blog post I offer some compelling reasons as to why you should expand your skills and become certified on OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) as well.

1. The OIC environment now runs on OCI

Since your OIC instance is provisioned as a platform service within your OCI tenancy, it makes sense for you to better understand the underlying core infrastructure (such as Compute, Networking, Storage, etc.) that facilitate OIC’s runtime capabilities. In addition, many organizations that started with just OIC are now leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to extend other application and integration solutions into the cloud (such as lift-and-shift projects).

In short, being aware and becoming more skilled in OCI will improve your ability to offer advice for application integration initiatives or to innovate with modern cloud solutions.

2. OCI services can be used to facilitate or extend OIC use case solutions

Now that the OIC platform runs in your OCI tenancy, integrating and leveraging other OCI services is not only easy, but it becomes essential for designing and implementing more robust application integration solutions. Here are some examples of OIC use cases involving OCI services:

• Protecting your OIC REST-based integrations with API Gateway as described here.
• Sending messages to a Notifications topic from an OIC integration as described here.
• Invoking Oracle Functions from your OIC integration flow as described here.
• Using an Autonomous Database instance to implement the parking lot pattern for downstream throttling from OIC as described here.
• Working with data in Object Storage buckets as described here.
• Implementing Field Level Encryption (FLE) in OIC integrations by leveraging the Vault service as described here.
• Consuming messages from a Streaming service stream partition to trigger an OIC integration flow as described here.
• Leveraging Logging Analytics dashboards for viewing OIC metrics as described here.
• Triggering an OIC integration flow via the Events service as described here.
• Persisting OIC activity stream logs into the Logging service as described here.

Since there are hundreds of OIC integration solutions that leverage one or more OCI services, becoming more familiar with OCI is essential in your quest to become a more proficient OIC solutions architect or Integrations designer.

3. The OCI training is free

In addition, for a limited time until February 28, 2022, the certification exams are also free of charge. For the OIC professional, I recommend two OCI certifications:

• OCI Foundations Associate – As the name implies, this is where you get started with key foundational OCI training that covers the fundamentals of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services and how to navigate and work in your OCI tenancy.
• OCI Developer Associate – This training dives deeper into OCI services useful for developers, integrators, and solution architects.

You can also create an Oracle Cloud Free Tier account leveraging its 30-day free trial along with the always-free OCI cloud services.

Good luck as you continue your learning journey! 

Start training to get your OCI Foundations Associate certification.