My thoughts after successful Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2019 Cloud Operations Certified Associate Exam

Last Monday I have passed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2019 Cloud Operations Associate Exam (1Z0-1067). It was the third exam in a row, which I have decided to pass, a few weeks after Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Developer 2020 Certified Associate and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2019 Certified Architect Professional. Frankly speaking, my decision to pass CloudOps exam was mainly based on curiosity. In fact, I was asking myself a very simple question… What does it mean to be CloudOps in OCI? Despite the fact that every single day I use to work as Cloud Solution Architect, I believe CloudOps role is essential for cloud-based modern IT Shop. While Cloud Architect is responsible for the design and initial implementation, afterward someone should take over the cloud infra and maintain it, in a functional and healthy state. An extremely important role, isn’t it? So I have started to learn… Below I will document three things that were the most important for me during my learning path. Of course, for sure it is not covering everything in the exam. Let’s call it TOP3 topics important for me. The rest you should explore by yourself, as each exam is an individual journey for everyone 🙂 Hope you will understand it 🙂

OCI CLI

The first important topic is the usage of OCI CLI. I guess this tool will be the most essential for every OCI CloudOps team member. Although most of the things can be done with OCI Console, OCI CLI is extremely useful when things will be repeated many times and in that sense they are good candidates for some sort of automation. Everyone who wants to pass this exam should investigate the concept of OCI CLI Profiles. On the other you should be fully aware of and understand the basics of filtering output using the JMESPath query option for JSON which is crucial when playing with large amounts of OCI CLI output. Finally you should also explore multipart upload concept for OCI Object Storage Buckets.

Terraform + OCI Resource Manager

I guess you already know that I am a big fan of Terraform… by the way… Have you checked my zero to hero training for OCI + Terraform? But anyhow… Terraform is there in this exam, what seems to be obvious, as Terraform as an automation engine will be a fundamental tool for many OCI-based or multi-cloud IT shops. You should be aware of Terraform fundamentals including local and remote state files, terraform plan, and terraform apply commands. OCI Resource Manager (ORM) is a natural extension of Terraform. ORM is an OCI PaaS offering that helps CloudOps to deploy topologies in OCI. Before the exam, I guess you should be aware of the Stacks and Jobs concepts. And to be honest… it won’t be only useful before the exam. It will also help you in your daily routines with OCI.

Security

In a cloud environment security is a fundamental thing. It means the CloudOps team should follow security rules every single day, without any compromises. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that security will play a significant role in this exam, right? I am not able to cover every single topic which will be in your exam questions, but I would like to encourage you to explore Compartment’s Security concepts. The most complex topic for me is a question of subcompartment move restrictions and implications. Especially in terms of the effects on IAM policies granted on groups for the compartment hierarchy. You should be able to fully understand how groups lose access to a compartment after a move, or in opposite the groups will gain access. What is automatically propagated and what should be re-applied. Please explore that topic in detail by reading this page.

That is all for now. Hope this will help you prepare for the exam. And of course, fingers crossed for your success!!! 🙂

Martin, The Cook.