OCI Notes Flashcards

Question 1

Q

Oracle Cloud is classified into two main categories

Answer

A

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
Oracle Cloud Applications

Question 2

Q

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

Answer

A

Infrastructure and platform services that are designed to run any type of application.
It could be a modern cloud-native application or service or any other mission-critical workloads.

Question 3

Q

Core services of OCI

Answer

A

Compute
storage
networking

Question 4

Q

Oracle Cloud applications

Question 5

Q

Three main constructs of this physical architecture of OCI

Answer

A

Regions
Availability domains (ADs)
Fault domains (FDs)

Question 6

Q

Region

Answer

A

Region represents a localized geographic area that is comprised of one or more availability domains
These availability domains are connected to each other by a low latency, high bandwidth network.

Question 7

Q

Availability Domain (AD)

Answer

A

Data Center
Isolated from each other, fault tolerant, unlikely to fail simultaneously.
Physical infrastructure not share

Question 8

Q

Fault Domain (FD)

Answer

A

fault domain, which is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within each availability domain.
The key purpose of using separate fault domains is to protect against any unexpected hardware failure or even against planned outages that can occasionally occur during compute hardware maintenance.
Each availability domain (AD) contains three fault domains that provide for anti-affinity, which means it allows you to distribute resources instead of running on the same physical hardware.

Question 9

Q

Some of the criteria for choosing a particular region.

Answer

A

Choose a region that is closest to the majority of users for reasons such as lower latency and highest performance.
Regulatory compliance for storing your enterprise data.
OCI service availability.

Question 10

Q

OCI Compute Service

Answer

A

OCI Compute allows you to create and manage compute resources/compute instances/servers

Question 11

Q

Three types of compute instances

Answer

A

Virtual machine (VM)
is a logical server that runs on top of a physical bare metal server
Bare Metal Machine
is a dedicated physical server for the highest performance.
Dedicated VM host,
allowing you to run your VMs on a dedicated server as opposed to them running on a shared physical server.

Question 12

Q

Compute Shape

Answer

A

Template that determines the number of CPUs, the amount of memory, and all other computing resources that are allocated to the instance.
Currently, OCI allows to choose either AMD, Intel, or Arm-based processor.

Question 13

Q

Two types of shapes.

Answer

A

Fixed shapes are a specific number of CPUS in memory and cannot be customized. And this applies to all bare metal physical instances, of course, there are fixed size, but VMs can also select a fixed shape as well.
Flexible shapes, on the other hand, allow you to customize the number of CPUs and the amount of memory you need, but, of course, this is only an option for virtual machines.

Question 14

Q

Vertical scaling

Answer

A

Allows you the ability to scale up or scale down. This simply means that you can change the shape or size of the VM to something smaller or something larger.
Just be aware that there will be a brief downtime for your virtual machine since it will have to be stopped for resizing it. Then it can be restarted with the new number of CPUs and memory size.

Question 15

Q

Horizontal scaling or Autoscaling

Answer

A

Automatically add more compute instances of the same shape
This can be achieved in one of two ways.
- The first is metric-based autoscaling. Here you choose a performance metric to be monitored along with setting a threshold for that metric. And then when the threshold is met, it triggers an autoscaling event to increase or decrease the number of VMs.
- The second option is scheduled-based autoscaling. Here you define specific times of the day or perhaps certain days of the week to automatically increase or decrease the number of compute instances.

Question 16

Q

Three main types of storage services–

Answer

A

Block volumes
File storage
Object storage

Question 17

Q

Block Volume

Answer

A

Through the Block Volume service, you can create a virtual logical disk that you can attach to the VM. So like a hard drive, it is only used by that compute instance.
Here the data in each volume is stored as blocks.
The block volume disk that you attach to your virtual machine compute instance is always persistent, which means that even after deleting that compute instance, you can still keep that volume disk intact and use it later for another VM.

Question 18

Q

File storage service

Answer

A

This is another type of virtual storage, but this can be accessed from one or more virtual machines or any other OCI Compute instance type, such as bare metal machines. Think about file storage like a network drive that you can map to your computer, but this same drive could also be mapped by other users. So it allows for file sharing.
As we saw earlier, file storage is usually used as a shared storage for multiple compute instances.
It’s ideal for applications that are running on containers or big data and analytics workloads. In contrast to block volumes where data is stored as blocks, in file storage, the data is managed as files. And there are several advanced capabilities that you can leverage when using the file storage service that makes it ideal for running microservices-based applications.

Question 19

Q

Object Storage

Answer

A

which can be accessed from anywhere to include a remote internet client like a web browser.
Another difference is that files are stored as objects, which can be anything to include images, videos, or any other type of file, typically used to support web and mobile-based applications.
the object storage service provides internet-scale, high-performance storage, which is reliable, and it provides more cost-efficient data durability options.
Object storage is most often used for storing unstructured data, such as image files or videos or log files.
as in its name the data is managed as objects where these objects are stored in a construct called buckets.
A bucket can be considered similar to a folder that’s used to contain these objects, and it provides several advanced capabilities which makes this a reliable and durable storage platform.

Question 20

Q

The core resource you can provision for network computing is aptly called a Virtual Cloud Network, or VCN for short.

Answer

A

you can configure constructs, such as public subnets and private subnets. Think of these as a subdivision of the larger network, sometimes referred to as a subnetwork.
- hosting web app instance in public subnet so customers able to connect to this web app through the internet.
- hosting database instance in private subnets so it is not reachable from the internet.
- But at the same time, the web server and the database instances should be able to communicate with each other.

Question 21

Q

you can configure constructs, such as public subnets and private subnets. Think of these as a subdivision of the larger network, sometimes referred to as a subnetwork.

Overall, the VCN itself is defined as a virtual private network that you can set up for secure communications between resources. It is a regional service, which means a VCN resides in a single OCI region. Fortunately, you can use a VCN across multiple availability domains that belong to that OCI region.

This service is designed as highly available, and it is massively scalable. Most importantly, this is a highly secure network since it is designed to be private as its default. Essentially, no one can use or access it unless you explicitly define that specific allow rule.

Question 22

Q

Overall, the VCN itself is defined as a virtual private network that you can set up for secure communications between resources. It is a regional service, which means a VCN resides in a single OCI region. Fortunately, you can use a VCN across multiple availability domains that belong to that OCI region.

This service is designed as highly available, and it is massively scalable. Most importantly, this is a highly secure network since it is designed to be private as its default. Essentially, no one can use or access it unless you explicitly define that specific allow rule.

Answer

A

Overall, the VCN itself is defined as a virtual private network that you can set up for secure communications between resources.
It is a regional service, which means a VCN resides in a single OCI region.
Fortunately, you can use a VCN across multiple availability domains that belong to that OCI region.
This service is designed as highly available,
and it is massively scalable.
Most importantly, this is a highly secure network since it is designed to be private as its default.
Essentially, no one can use or access it unless you explicitly define that specific allow rule.

Question 23

Q

Gateway

Answer

A

The communication to and from the VCN is facilitated through different gateways depending on the use case.
A gateway is simply a device that decides where to route the traffic, depending on various factors, such as the
- protocol,
- the IP address,
- and the final destination.

Question 24

Q

Three most commonly used gateways that can be attached to a VCN.

Internet Gateway
Network Address Translation Gateway (NAT Gateway)
Service Gateway

Dynamic Routing Gateway

Answer

A

Internet Gateway is a virtual router that provides internet connectivity for resources inside your VCN as long as they’re assigned to a public subnet. For example, our web server instance
- can communicate with other external services on the internet
- or external internet clients can access the web application through this gateway.
Network Address Translation Gateway (NAT gateway) is another type of virtual router that’s often used by instances running in private subnets. It provides for
- connections only to the internet.
- That means it will not receive any inbound connections initiated from external internet clients.
- You often use the NAT Gateway for use cases, such as the need to install updates or patches on your compute instances.
Service Gateway allows resources in your VCN, either in a public or private subnet to securely access various other Oracle Cloud Services, such as object storage as shown here through an internal network, and thus bypassing the internet altogether.

Question 25

Q

dynamic routing gateway to the VCN. However, you’ll need another OCI service in addition to the dynamic routing gateway in order to achieve this connectivity to a private on-premises network. Now one option is site-to-site VPN, which provides a private and secure communications tunnel as an analogy– think about those occasions where you need to access your corporate office network from your home network. You first connect to the corporate VPN, and then you would be able to access internal corporate websites. Well, OCI site-to-site VPN is a similar VPN service.

The second option is called FastConnect, which is another way of creating a dedicated private connection between your on-premises data center and OCI, and this provides higher bandwidth options and a more reliable and consistent network experience as compared to internet-based VPN connection.

Answer

A

Need to add a dynamic routing gateway to the VCN for connectivity between resources in your VCN and your on-premises data center.

Need addition OCI service to achieve this:
1. site-to-site VPN, which provides a private and secure communications tunnel as an analogy– think about those occasions where you need to access your corporate office network from your home network. You first connect to the corporate VPN, and then you would be able to access internal corporate websites. Well, OCI site-to-site VPN is a similar VPN service.
2. FastConnect, which is another way of creating a dedicated private connection between your on-premises data center and OCI, and this provides higher bandwidth options and a more reliable and consistent network experience as compared to internet-based VPN connection.

Question 26

Q

Shared Security Model, which simply means that the overall security of your resources in OCI is a shared responsibility between you as the customer and Oracle.

Shared Security Model
Security of customer resources in OCI is a shared responsibility between customer and Oracle:

Answer

A

Oracle Manages
1. Physical Data Center
2. Physical Network
3. Physical Hosts
4. Virtualization

Customer Manage
1. Operating System
2. Network Controls
3. Applications
4. Accounts and Identities
5. Devices
6. Data

Question 27

Q

OCI provides many security services that you can easily leverage to protect your cloud applications and resources.

Answer

A

Starting with the infrastructure protection layer, there are services, such as the web application firewall for securing any internet-facing application server, which will filter malicious inbound web traffic. Also, you can configure security lists or network security groups which essentially function as virtual firewalls in your VCN.

Additionally, the network firewall service is a cloud native firewall that can control all types of traffic into your applications. The second layer of security services involves identity and access Management. By default, access to all cloud resources is completely restricted. No one can access them. But you can explicitly grant access to one or more resources using IAM policies. You can create user accounts and groups and set policies to allow them the most restrictive access to just the specific cloud resources they need.

Multifactor authentication provides an additional level of security where a user would need to log in using their password, then also provide an additional passcode that is dynamically generated by an authentication app. The next layer of protection involves operating systems and workloads. For example, the Bastion service provides a secure way to access target resources in private networks. OS management services allow you to manage and monitor updates and patches for operating system environments.

Data protection is another critical layer for security. Vault key and secrets management services are used to centrally manage and maintain control of encryption keys used to protect enterprise data as well as secret credentials that are used to securely access resources. Data Safe provides a complete and integrated set of features for protecting sensitive and regulated data in Oracle Cloud databases.

And, finally, there are security services that can be leveraged for detection and remediation. For example, Cloud Guard is a cloud data service that helps customers to maintain a strong security posture in Oracle Cloud. And the Vulnerability Scanning service can be used to routinely check hosts and container images for potential security vulnerabilities.

Question 28

Q

Security Services

Infrastructure Protection
Identity and Access Management
OS and Workload Protection
Data Protection
Detection and Remediation

Answer

A

1. Infrastructure Protection
* DDos Protection
* Web Application Firewall - Filter malicious web traffic
* Security Lists/NSG - Virtual firewalls
* Network Firewall - contrals traffic into application

2. Identity and Access Management
* IAM - Manage user access and policies
* MFA - Manage multi-factor authentication
* Federation - Single sign-on to identity providers
* Audit - Record API calls automatically

3. OS and Workload Protection
* Shield Instances - Secure Boot, Measured Boot, TPM
* Dedicated Host - Workload isolation
* Bastion - provides a secure way to access target resources in private networks.
* OS Management - OS patch and package management

4. Data Protection
* Vault Key Management - Encryption for data at rest and in transit
* Vault Secrets Management - Centralized key storage & management
* Data Safe - Rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets
* Certificates - Discover, classify, and protect data

5. Detection and Remediation
* Cloud Guard - Security posture management
* Security Zones - Secure Enclave
* Security Advisor - Security Advisor
* Vulnerability Scanning - Vulnerability & exposure scanning

Question 29

Q

Oracle offers a range of database services in Oracle Cloud. In general, we can break them down by where the system is residing, whether it’s Oracle public cloud or is it the customer data center. And who is managing the infrastructure and the database?

Answer

A

Base Database Service (built on standard compute and storage options. It’s typically for workloads with smaller processing and storage requirements.)
- Oracle Database Standard Edition
- Oracle Database Enterprise Edition
Exadata Database Service (built on Exadata platform and, as a result, offer the highest performance scale and availability.)
- Exadata Databse Service on Dedicated Infrastructure (public cloud)
- Exadata Databse Service on Cloud@Customer (customer data centers)
Autonomous Database (fully autonomous and managed by Oracle)
- Autonomous Database on Shared & Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure (public cloud)
- Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer (customer data centers)

Question 30

Q

Autonomous Database can be deploy in Shared or Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure

Answer

A

Shared Exadata Infrastructure
- Provision and manage only the Autonomous DB
- Oracle handles Exadata infrastructure deployment and management
Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure
- Exclusive use of the Exadata hardware

Question 31

Q

Autonomous Database workload type

Answer

A

Autonomous Transaction Processing (built for transactional workloads)
Autonomous Data Warehouse (built for decision support and data warehouse workloads)
JSON and APEX (supported only on shared infrastructure)

Question 32

Q

Exadata Databse Service on Dedicated Infrastructure

Exadata Databse Service on Cloud@Customer

Answer

A

Then we have Exadata Database Service on dedicated infrastructure in the public cloud and Exadata Cloud@Customer. They are both built on the Exadata platform and, as a result, offer the highest performance scale and availability. Now Exadata Cloud@Customer offers the same cloud economics and cloud automation as Exadata Database Services on dedicated infrastructure in Oracle public cloud. But it’s deployed in customer data centers.

Question 33

Q

Autonomous Database on Shared & Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure

Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer

Answer

A

Then we have the Autonomous Database, which is fully autonomous and managed by Oracle and is available both in Oracle public cloud on OCI and in the customer’s data center on Exadata Cloud@Customer. Now when you create an Autonomous Database, you can deploy it to one of two kinds of Exadata infrastructure, shared and dedicated. And we’ll talk about that in a minute.

Question 34

Q

Autonomous Database
Deployment options:
* Shared - Provision and manage only the Autonomous DB, Oracle handles Exadata infrastructure deployment and management

Dedicated - Exclusive use of the Exadata hardware

Fully managed database with two workload types:
* Autonomous Transaction Processing
* Autonomous Data Warehouse

what are the advantages of an Autonomous Database?
* Back up
* Patching
* Upgrading
* Tuning

Answer

A

Now when you create an Autonomous Database, you can deploy it to one of two kinds of Exadata infrastructure, shared and dedicated. And we’ll talk about that in a minute.

And then there are different workload types– Autonomous Transaction Processing, which is built for transactional workloads, and Autonomous Data Warehouse that is built for decision support and data warehouse workloads.

Now let’s also talk about the deployment options. The first one is dedicated, where you have exclusive use of the Exadata hardware. And then we have shared where you can provision and manage only the Autonomous Database, while Oracle is going to handle Exadata infrastructure deployment and management. Please note that we also have two more workload types, which is JSON and APEX, which are supported only on shared infrastructure.

So what are the advantages of an Autonomous Database? Well, Autonomous databases automatically backup your database for you. It also provides automated patching, upgrades, and tuning, including performing all routine database maintenance tasks while the system is running. And all this without any human intervention.

Question 35

Q

What are the advantages of an Autonomous Database?

Answer

A

Autonomous databases automatically :

Back up
Patching
Upgrading
Tuning

Question 36

Q

MySQL Database Service with HeatWave

Answer

A

MySQL HeatWave.
It’s a fully managed database service that enables customers to run OLTP, OLAP,
and machine learning workloads directly from their MySQL database.
It’s powered by the integrated HeatWave in-memory query accelerator,
and it’s the only Cloud native database service that combines transactions, analytics, and machine learning services into MySQL database and,
in turn, delivering real-time secure analytics without the complexity latency and cost of ETL duplication. And it also accelerates MySQL queries by 400 times.

Question 37

Q

MySQL Database Service with HeatWave

Answer

A

Easily run high performance analytics against your MySQL Database, no ETL required
Single MySQL database for Online transaction processing (OLTP) & Online analytical processing (OLAP) applications
Extreme performance: 400x faster than MySQL, scales to thousands of cores

Question 38

Q

Developer Services

Now within the Navigation menu on the OCI Console, you will find a tab titled Developer Services.

Answer

A

Containers & Artifacts
- Containers & Artifacts
- Kubernetes Clusters (OKE)
- Container Instances
- Container Registry
- Artifact Registry
- Service Mesh
Functions
- Functions
- Applications
API Management
- API Management
- Gateways
- APIs
DevOps
- DevOps
- Overview
- Projects
Resource Manager
- Resource Manager
- Overview
- Stacks
- Jobs
- Private templates
- Configuration Source Providers
- Private Endpoints
Developer Resources
- Developer Resources
- SDK
- CLI
- PowerShell
- Terraform
- Ansible
- Docs

First, we have Containers and Artifacts. So these are basically used for managing containerized applications. They are associated resources and they are deployments. Functions hosts applications while abstracting from the actual servers.

OCI also provides a comprehensive set of services to manage the lifecycle of APIs. Then we have the OCI DevOps service, which is a complete continuous integration and continuous delivery platform for developers to simplify and automate their software development lifecycle.

And then we have the Resource Manager that lets you deploy infrastructure as code with managed Terraform. And finally, the Developer Resources, which are tools for writing applications that leverage OCI directly.

Question 39

Q

The building block of Cloud Native Application

The term Cloud Native refers to an application that was designed to reside in the Cloud from the very start.

Answer

A

these features that we discussed enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient and manageable.

Containers
- software packages which ideally perform well-defined task
Microservices
- approach to software development
- where software is composed of independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs
Declarative Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
- Desired State System
Immutable Infrastructure
- Managing Services
- Software Deployments
- Components are replaced rather than changed. So whenever any change occurs, the application or service is effectively redeployed.
Service Mesh
- way to control how different parts of an application share data with one another

The first is Containers. So Containers are software packages which ideally perform well-defined task. Then, we have Microservices. Think of it like an approach to software development, where software is composed of independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs.

Then, we have Declarative Application Programming Interfaces, which is also known as APIs. A Declarative API is basically a desired state system. You provide a certain state you want the system to create and you don’t care about all the steps that is needed to achieve that state.

Then, we have a concept of Immutable Infrastructure. This is an approach to managing services and software deployments on IT resources, wherein components are replaced rather than changed. So whenever any change occurs, the application or service is effectively redeployed.

Lastly, we have Service Mesh. It’s basically a way to control how different parts of an application share data with one another. So these features that we discussed enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient and manageable.

Question 40

Q

OCI Observability and Management, focusing on the three foundational services– monitoring, logging, and events.

Answer

A

monitoring, logging, and events.

Question 41

Q

Monitoring

Answer

A

To better understand these services, let’s look at an example that involves the active monitoring of compute instance virtual machines. So let’s imagine that these three VMs are running one or more applications. And these servers would, of course, be consuming compute resources such as CPUs and memory. This resource utilization data is referred to as metrics.

Next, we define some conditions, such as aggregating this data or measuring the latest CPU utilization for each VM. We can then create an alarm. And in this case, we define the criteria for the alarm to be triggered if the CPU utilization goes above 80% on any of these compute VMs.

Finally, in this scenario, we configure a notification that sends an email to someone on the operations team when this condition occurs. This is a simple example workflow that illustrates the importance of monitoring.

Question 42

Q

Observability Pillars

Answer

A

Metrics
- Resource Utilization
- CPU/Memory
- Storage Usage
Logs
- VM
- Networking
- Application
Traces
Events

Observability, by definition, is the ability to understand the internal state of a system by performing a deeper analysis of the collected data. Well, what sort of data can be collected? Essentially, there are four conceptual observability pillars of data. The first one is metrics. As we saw in our example, metrics is simply raw data about some system or component, such as resource utilization, CPU use, or memory consumption. Or it could be data about the amount of storage that has been used.

The second pillar includes logs. These are usually created automatically and are used continuously by any system, such as a virtual machine or a network or even an application. It can be anything. These logs typically provide a timestamp and detailed information as to what is happening at that moment in time. For example, if an application is trying to connect to another application, this will be captured in the log.

The third one is traces. These are similar to logs, except they are not scoped to a single system or application. Instead, traces provide data about how separate components are operating and performing with one another. For example, if a user tries to connect to an application running in a VM, trace information would have details about the connection, such as how they connected and from which device the connection was made.

The last one is events. Events are similar to both metrics and logs in that they produce data associated with a specific resource but indicate what specific action has occurred. For example, when a new compute VM is created, a VM Create Event is produced with all of the associated metadata about that event. Other examples include deleting a VM, creating or deleting an object storage bucket, or adding a dynamic routing gateway to a VCN.

So then, there are several observability and management services that use these data pillars that can be used to analyze deeper as to what is really happening in the entire environment. The monitoring, logging, and event services are essentially the foundation of the Observability and Management platform. But OCI also provides other more advanced services. These include Logging Analytics, Application Performance Monitoring, Database Management Services, and Operations Insights.

Question 43

Q

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Observability and Management Services

Answer

A

Monitoring
- Actively and Passively monitor cloud resources
- Uses Metrics and Alarms
- Single Pane of glass view with Dashboards
Logging
- Centralized and secure log management
- Built on open standards
- Types of logs - Service, Custom, Audit
- Service Connectors to transfer log data
Event Services
- Enable you to automate based on state changes of resources
- Uses Rules and Actions
Logging Analytics
Application Performance Monitoring
Database Management
Operations Insights

Question 44

Q

Welcome back. In this lesson, we’ll talk about OCI Observability and Management, focusing on the three foundational services– monitoring, logging, and events. Let’s get started.