Monthly Archives: April 2020

Preparing for 1Z0-1085-20 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations 2020 Associate Exam

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A quick article on how to prepare for 1Z0-1085-20 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations 2020 Associate certification exam.

OCI Foundations Associate 2020

OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) Foundations 2020 Associate is a foundation level exam. If you are coming from another cloud service provider background then it will be a piece of cake for you. Being a foundation level exam will test you on a conceptual basis only.

Its a 60 multiple choice questions exam which you have to complete in 105 minutes. Approximately 2 minutes to spare per question which is pretty good enough for foundation level exam. Questions and answers are small so you don’t have to invest much time in reading and you can complete the exam well before time.

The exam costs $95 and the passing score is 68%. At the time of writing this article, due to the COVID-19 epidemic, Oracle announced course material and exam free of cost for a specific period of time. The exam currently available under online proctored mode from Pearson since most of the exam centers are closed in view of COVID-19 lock-down.

Journey to AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Certification

Read our another article about preparation for the AWS certification

Let’s walk through exam topics and points you need to consider while preparing for this certification. An exam guide from Oracle can be viewed here.

Exam topics are :

  1. Cloud concepts
  2. OCI fundamentals
  3. Core OCI services
  4. Security and compliance
  5. OCI Pricing, billing, and support

Cloud concepts

If you are coming with a background of any other cloud provider like AWS, then you got it covered already.

  • You should be through with concepts of HA (High Availability), FT (Fault Tolerance) and the difference between them.
  • What is the cloud?
  • Know the advantages of cloud over the on-prem data center.
  • Get familiar with RTO and RPO concepts.

OCI Fundamentals

This topic covers basics of OCI i.e. how it is architected.

  • Understand concepts of the region, AD (Availability Domain)and FD (Fault Domain)
  • Types of the region – Single AD and multi AD
  • Learn about compartments and tenancy

Core OCI services

In this topic, you are introduced to core OCI services at a higher level. There is no need for a deep dive into each service. A high-level understanding of each is enough for this exam.

  • OCI Compute service. Learn all the below offerings.
    • Bare metal
    • Dedicated virtual host
    • Virtual Machine
    • Container engine
    • Functions
  • OCI Storage services. Learn below offerings
    • Block Volume
    • Local NVMe
    • File Storage service
    • Object service
    • Archive storage
    • Data transfer service
  • OCI Networking services
    • VCN (Virtual Cloud Network)
    • Peering
    • Different kind of gateways
      • NAT Gateway
      • DRG Gateway
      • Internet Gateway
    • Load balancers
    • NSG (Network Security Groups) and SL (Security Lists)
  • OCI IAM service
    • Concept of principals and Instance principals
    • Groups and dynamic groups
    • Policy understanding along with syntax and parameters
  • OCI Database service. Study all below offerings
    • VM DB systems
    • Bare Metal DB systems
    • RAC
    • Exadata DB systems
    • Autonomous data warehouse
    • Study backup, HA, DR strategies
  • Have a high-level understanding of below services :
    • OCI Key management service
    • OCI DNS service
    • Data safe
    • OS Management service
    • OCI WAF
    • Audit log service
  • Tagging
    • Usages
    • Type: free form and defined
    • Tag namespaces

Security and complilance

OCI security consists of different facets. Understand below areas in context to security

  • Cloud shared security model
  • Securing OCI using IAM
  • data at rest and data in transit protection
  • Key management service
  • HA, FT using AD, FD or services for data protection

OCI Pricing, billing and support

Understand how pricing and billing work in each service we saw above. Learn pricing high/low among tiers in storage services. You don’t need to remember any numbers but you should know it contextually like which is priced high and which one is low etc.

Learn billing models in OCI

  • PAYG (Pay as you go)
  • Monthly Flex
  • BYOL

Understand budget service and how tags, compartments can help in billing and budgeting.

Learn about the SLA structure offered by Oracle. This part is missing in OCI online training.

That’s all you have to know to clear this exam. As I said if you are coming from AWS, Azure then you can relate almost everything to those cloud services which makes it easy to learn and understand.

I created my last day revision notes here (most of the reference to AWS for comparison) which might be useful for you as well.

Now, just little bit of study and go for it! All the best!

Our other certification preparation articles

  1. Preparing for CLF-C01 AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam
  2. Journey to AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Certification SAP-C01

Run commands & copy files on salt clients from SUSE Manager Server

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Lets check out salt CLI a bit!

In this article, we will walk you through a list of useful commands to interact with salt clients and get your work done.

We have covered SUSE Manager right from installation till configuration and client registration in our list of articles in the past. For now, let’s dive into a list of commands you can use to complete tasks on salt clients remotely via SUSE Manager.

You can always check out the list of salt modules available to choose from. I am listing our only a few of them which are useful in day-to-day tasks. Few of these tasks can be done from SUSE Manager UI as well but if you want to script them then using salt CLI is a way better option.

In the below examples, we have our SUSE Manager kerneltalks and salt client k-client1

Copy files from SUSE Manager to salt clients

There are two ways to copy a file. If you are copying simple text files then below command is just fine for you. salt-cp clientname/FQDN source destination 

kerneltalks:~ # salt-cp k-client1 test1 /tmp/
k-client1:
    ----------
    /tmp/test1:
        True

Here we copied test1 file in the current directory from SUSE Manager to k-client1:/tmp.

It will treat files in question as text files and hence should not be used for a binary files. It will corrupt binary files or just fails to copy them. So if I try to copy zip file from SUSE Manager I see below error –

kerneltalks:~ # salt-cp k-client1 test2.gz /tmp/
[ERROR   ] An un-handled exception was caught by salt's global exception handler:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: invalid start byte
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/salt-cp", line 10, in <module>
    salt_cp()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/salt/scripts.py", line 418, in salt_cp
    client.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/salt/cli/cp.py", line 52, in run
    cp_.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/salt/cli/cp.py", line 142, in run
    ret = self.run_oldstyle()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/salt/cli/cp.py", line 153, in run_oldstyle
    arg = [self._load_files(), self.opts['dest']]
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/salt/cli/cp.py", line 126, in _load_files
    files.update(self._file_dict(fn_))
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/salt/cli/cp.py", line 115, in _file_dict
    data = fp_.read()
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/codecs.py", line 321, in decode
    (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: invalid start byte

In such cases, you can use the below salt module to copy over files from SUSE Manager to salt clients. For that, you need to keep your file under /srv/salt directory on the SUSE Manager server.

kerneltalks:/srv/salt # ls -lrt
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 44 Apr  3 12:26 test2.gz
kerneltalks:~ # salt k-client1 cp.get_file salt://test2.gz /tmp/
k-client1:
    /tmp/test2.gz

Now we successfully copied zip file from SUSE Manager kerneltalks:/srv/salt/test2.gz to salt client k-client1:/tmp

Execute remote commands on salt clients from SUSE Manager

Now this part where we will run commands on the salt client from SUSE Manager. The command output will be returned to you on current session. You can run a couple of commands together separated by ; same as the shell.

kerneltalks:/srv/salt # salt k-client1 cmd.run 'df -Ph; date'
k-client1:
    Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    devtmpfs        489M     0  489M   0% /dev
    tmpfs           496M   12K  496M   1% /dev/shm
    tmpfs           496M   14M  482M   3% /run
    tmpfs           496M     0  496M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
    /dev/xvda1      9.8G  1.6G  7.7G  17% /
    Fri Apr  3 12:30:49 UTC 2020

Here we successfully ran df -Ph and date command on salt client remotely from SUSE Manager.

Make sure if you have multiple commands to run then bundle them to script, copy it over to the client using the above method and then execute the script on the client from SUSE Manager using run command module.

If you see below error that means your mentioned client is not registered with SUSE Manager or you have misspelled client name or use FQDN

kerneltalks:~ # salt-cp k-client1 test1 /tmp/
No minions matched the target. No command was sent, no jid was assigned.

Installing packages on salt client using salt cli

You can execute this task from the SUSE Manager web UI as well. But if you want to script it then salt CLI is a better option.

Installing a package is an easy task. Use pkg.install salt module and submit one or more lists of packages to be installed on the remote salt system.

Install single package using –

kerneltalks:~ # salt k-client1 pkg.install 'telnet'
k-client1:
    ----------
    telnet:
        ----------
        new:
            1.2-165.63
        old:

Install multiple packages using –

kerneltalks:~ # salt k-client1 pkg.install pkgs='["telnet", "apache2"]'
k-client1:
    ----------
    apache2:
        ----------
        new:
            2.4.23-29.40.1
        old:
    apache2-prefork:
        ----------
        new:
            2.4.23-29.40.1
        old:
    apache2-utils:
        ----------
        new:
            2.4.23-29.40.1
        old:
    libapr-util1:
        ----------
        new:
            1.5.3-2.8.1
        old:
    libapr1:
        ----------
        new:
            1.5.1-4.5.1
        old:
    liblua5_2:
        ----------
        new:
            5.2.4-6.1
        old:
    libnghttp2-14:
        ----------
        new:
            1.7.1-1.84
        old:
    telnet:
        ----------
        new:
            1.2-165.63
        old:

Here you can see it installed telnet and apache2 packages remotely along with its dependencies. Be sure that if the package is already installed and its updated version is available to install then the salt will update it. Hence you can see new and old version details in output.