First thing first; full disclosure; Readers should know I am an employee of Oracle cloud, although since my teams have nothing to do with the certification teams, this blog will demonstrate a candidate’s perspective.
Last week, pretty much as soon as the first Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) multicloud exam became available, I was excited to take it, I did. And received the results right after. I had passed. Here in this post, I will share my proposed preparation approach and resources to help you develop a more efficient plan.
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2023 Multicloud Architect Associate (1Z0-1115-23) is designed by a CSP for the ever-growing multicloud scenarios. My first impression after checking out the test information was that, this multiple-choice exam looked remarkably shorter than almost any other certification exams that I had taken prior to my attempt. I had seen long Cisco and Microsoft exams including the 8-hour CCIE labs as well as other long OCI certifications which were fairly long, but 60 minutes sounded shorter than usual to me. The test includes 30 questions, and the candidate will have 60 minutes to complete the exam.
With a published pass mark of 65% I would expect a well-prepared candidate to have no issues in passing the test with flying colors. This, however; is a double-edged sword, with 30 questions only, missing a few questions here and there could dramatically drop your score and bring you dangerously close to 65%. That was the second thought I had after seriously starting my preparation journey.
Let’s have a quick look at the blueprint although, this is my personal interpretation of the official exam guide and you can find greater details on the Oracle Web site.
The main topics
- Multicloud introduction and use cases
After reviewing the exam information this sounded like the easiest part to me. Nowadays, very few people involved in cloud engineering have no experience with multicloud environments. In fact, many engineers, and architects I meet on different occasions design, implement, and operate multicloud environments daily. At least in the last few years it has turned into one of the main trends in cloud engineering. Admittedly, I rarely meet individuals who can clearly explain and whiteboard the benefits of such environments beyond cost saving and/or their very own environment. This section of the exam requires you to fully understand the key benefits of such deployments in general and specifically between OCI and other cloud providers. To better prepare for this section, unless you work for an integrator, vendor or partner who designs and implements such solutions every day, I suggest you look up and check out various use cases. Oracle CloudWorld 2022 had several discussions around the topic, so does the OCI A-Team blogging website. There are also several other places including various forums where people are discussing their real-world implementations. Why did they choose to use more than one cloud provider beside potential opportunities to cut costs? What’s the key driver? What’re the key concerns? And how do they address such issues?
- The Core OCI Services
I took the test as someone with network and systems engineering background and found this part the most relevant section to my background. To be successful in this part of the test you need to fully understand the overall architecture of an OCI implementation and if you have any other cloud experience other than OCI, your learning curve is not going to be steep at all. Let’s take a simple customer environment as an example. In OCI, your customer would like to have presence in 3 regions (say PHX, LHR and FRA). It works very much like back in the days when wanted to have geographical diversity. In each region they’re going to have access to multiple Availability Domains (AD) and in each AD they will have different Fault Domains (FD) to improve the resiliency of their architecture. Well, most regions are made of multiple data centers so that makes sense too. The customer, will have several Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) with as many subnets as they need and that’s where they will host their compute shapes and load balancers. Simple enough. To connect their cloud footprint directly to the Internet they would use Internet Gateways (IGW) and to add a little security and make the connections to the Internet one-way only, they use a NAT gateway which could be the cloud native solution provided by OCI or basically any NAT solution of their own that the customer would like to deploy. Up to this point, you’ve quickly built what we used to have in any traditional enterprise network. OCI also supports another cool construct called Service Gateway (SGW) to provide private (away from the Internet) access to a wide range of OCI services and could further enhance your architecture. While this offers the quickest glimpse into the OCI networking, it also shows you how straightforward it is to get started and study for this section of the test. Your cloud footprint might also need some IAM strategy to control authentication and authorization processes and perhaps your strategy needs to work with other cloud providers (particularly Microsoft Azure) to form a federated relationship (which we will discuss shortly).
- Multicloud Network Connectivity
What if your hypothetical customer above would like to connect their OCI footprint to their physical data center (also known as on-premises)? They’re hosting critical applications on the cloud and would need a reliable and low-latency connection. Hence, they decide to use Oracle FastConnect technology to build such links. Although, they would also have the option to use the less reliable and low bandwidth site-to-site IPSec VPN solutions. Finally, OCI, like any other cloud provider, offers a variety of options for private reliable connections (in this case FastConnect) that starts from collocating in the same data center with OCI to building long distance circuits via a 3rd party carrier. Regardless of the architecture, the goal never changes, we all have seen the reliability issues with IPSec tunnels and a private channel like a FastConnect link could drastically improve your experience. OCI has comprehensive documentation on the details of these services and the Oracle A-Team again has published a significant number of blogs posts on the topic that can come in handy when you are preparing for the test. This applies to both #2 and #3 on this list.
- Oracle Database Service for Azure (ODSA)
In July 2022, Oracle and Microsoft took their multicloud partnership to the next level by offering a service called ODSA; which in its simplest term offers the ability to create, manage and monitor some of the most popular Oracle database services from Microsoft Azure. When deployed, the Azure users can create Oracle databases with an Azure-like experience and monitor a wide range of metrics and events related to their databases in Azure console. This technology remains in the core of the test (40% according to the blueprint) and the candidate is expected to be intimately familiar with the concept and its details. For ODSA to work, you would need to meet a set of requirements and have a base underlying environment ready. Then on top of that as an Azure admin you can kick off the rest of the process and in one of the two modes of automated or guided (semi-automated) complete the setup. The process of course includes several steps including setting up the right permissions, building the link between the two cloud providers and establishing the federation between the two cloud providers to enable Azure users login to OCI using the same credential (in automated mode). I used the OCI documentation on ODSA and found it very clear to prepare for the exam. Also, I came across a few blog posts published by the ODSA product teams that were quite interesting and I suggest everyone have a look at them. I am not going to include a link here but you can easily Google the keywords and locate them on Oracle website.
- Implement Azure Interconnect
Since 2019 Microsoft Azure and OCI have been in a strategic partnership to provide private connectivity between the two clouds. At the time of this writing (and probably until further notice on your exam too), there are 12 locations worldwide that the two public providers are connected. You might wonder, why would anyone need this service if ODSA, as described above, is available? Remember with ODSA you, as an Azure user, could create OCI databases and even have access to the details of their metrics and events in Azure. So why would I need another (lower level) service such as the Interconnect? The Interconnect can be thought of as an overarching service where you could use you Azure Express Route and OCI FastConnect to provide end to end private connectivity between the two footprint on OCI and Azure. With the Interconnect, you’re not limited to database as a service and you could basically run any application over the highly reliable and available fabric between the two clouds. This could be split workload, file transfer, migration process or any homegrown application that lives on both OCI and Azure; then services like Kafka could use the Interconnect for inter-cloud communications. This service forms the core of ODSA as its cornerstone. Although ODSA does a terrific job in hiding it from you and you don’t have to manage the Interconnect. All you need to do is to care about your databases and not how BGP works over the links between Oracle and Microsoft but what if you do want to have control over connectivity as well? And what if your specific use case is beyond creating, running, and monitoring databases? Then the interconnect service itself is available to you and the network engineers on your team. All in all, you can think of it as fiber between the two clouds where you can connect an Azure VNet to an OCI VCN and run pretty much anything over that link. The good news is; very few topics have been discussed more extensively than the Interconnect in OCI documentation and the A-Team blog posts.
- Basics of database administration (as it relates to the context of multicloud architecture)
Since ODSA is a service exclusively focused on multicloud for databases, I would say, a well-prepared candidate needs to be familiar with the basics of Oracle databases. ODSA currently supports the Base database (on VM), Exadata database, MySQL Heatwave and Autonomous database. A practical suggestion that I have made to a few exam candidates was to get started by watching a couple of short YouTube videos published by Oracle on these databases; especially the most recent developments around the Heatwave if you are interested in AI and ML. That would pique your interest. How many times you wished you had some sort of intelligence available in your toolbox to determine the number or amount of resources required to spin up a particular service? How many times you wondered if there was a way for your data scientists to train and build their ML models while the data were sitting in the database and not exported anywhere else? Well, the Heatwave grants many of your wishes and is supported by ODSA and of course at a high level is one of the topics of interest when you’re taking the multicloud exam. Needless to say, Oracle has many mature documents on the topic, however; if you’re just familiarizing yourself with the services, probably the official training videos cover what you need and even more. If you’ve taken a couple of database courses back in college and didn’t like those convoluted SQL queries rest assured what’s in-scope here has nothing to do with your last bitter experience.
How to prepare for the multicloud exam?
I used a combination of four resources: Oracle has extensive official documentation on all the topics mentioned in the blueprint which I went back to frequently and even printed some of the pages that I wanted to highlight and review later. This tremendously helped me the night before the exam. I didn’t have enough time to create my own flash cards but the printouts and my own notes played a similar role. Furthermore, the certification team also has created training videos for this exam which I found useful; especially on the topics that I was not super familiar with. I did watch them once carefully and take notes and then I reviewed the contents at a higher speed. Additionally, I liked the demos and walk-through scenarios; this comes in handy, especially if you don’t have access to everything needed to build your own lab environment.
The A-team blog posts should also be one of your key resources, especially on the networking topics and details of the Interconnect between OCI and Azure.
The last resource, that is overlooked by many, is to simply look up the terms that I wanted to learn more about and look for forum discussions where the actual operators of such services where talking about the ins and outs of each service and its benefits and challenges. For instance, you might be able to briefly compare the LVM and ASM methods to manage file systems for databases (and there are some solid official documentations on it), but you might also find it useful to check out what discussions people are having about those services on online forums. In fact, I’d like to suggest this as a method of learning beyond the multicloud exam, especially when you don’t have access to a specific gear for testing and building your own labs.
Overall, I spent just over 20 hours to prepare for the test but your milage may significantly vary depending on your background. For example, I had a quick look at the networking lessons while I spent a lot more time on databases to be sure I had every topic called out in the blueprint covered.
Lastly, OCI offers a free-tier service that you could use to gain some hands-on experience which I am sure many of you will enjoy.
Good luck!
