Best Practices

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides infrastructure and platform services for a wide range of enterprise workloads. In each service, you can choose from a rich array of features based on your goals. Oracle recommends a set of best practices to design and operate cloud topologies that deliver the maximum business value.

The best practices for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services are organized under four business goals:
  • Security and compliance: Secure and protect your systems and information assets in the cloud.
  • Reliability and resilience: Build reliable applications by architecting resilient cloud infrastructure.
  • Performance and cost optimization: Utilize infrastructure resources efficiently, and derive the best performance at the lowest cost.
  • Operational efficiency: Operate and monitor your applications and infrastructure resources to deliver the maximum business value.

For each business goal, the best practices are organized based on key focus areas, as follows:

Business Goal Key Focus Areas
Security and compliance
  • User authentication
  • Resource isolation and access control
  • Compute security
  • Database security
  • Data protection
  • Network security
Reliability and resilience
  • Fault-tolerant network architecture
  • Service limits and quotas
  • Data backup
  • Scaling
Performance and cost optimization
  • Compute sizing
  • Storage strategy
  • Network monitoring and tuning
  • Cost tracking and management
Operational efficiency
  • Deployment strategy
  • Workload monitoring
  • OS management
  • Support

About Personas

Many of the topics within the articles in this Best Practices solution list one or more "personas," intended to map to architect roles within typical Oracle Cloud Infrastructure organizations. You can use these personas as a guideline for which members of your organization are responsible for each of the best practices areas described.

Each persona is listed in this table with some suggested Oracle Cloud Infrastructure certifications offered by Oracle University. The focus areas indicate the best practices solution playbooks that present the most topics directed to that persona.

Persona Description Suggested Certifications Focus Areas
Application Architect Creator and curator of custom applications to be hosted on a cloud platform. Goals include understanding the tool set, utilizing the platform securely and efficiently, and maintaining stability. Focuses on taking advantage of the agility and scalability of a cloud platform to enhance the user experience.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Developer Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Certification
  • Security and Compliance
  • Reliability and Resilience
Cloud Architect Responsible for taking the needs and requirements of a workload or environment and selecting and organizing the best services and solutions for the deployed state of the host environment. Can see across the different cloud domains and interconnect the policies and requirements into a complete solution.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Professional Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Operations Associate Certification
  • Security and Compliance
  • Operational Efficiency
  • Reliability and Resilience
DevOps Architect Responsible for identifying the utility of virtualization and automation tools from the operations side and the process and skill set of the development side. Understands what is happening with a cloud application and develops and manages the tools to automatically respond. Collects and applies data from monitoring and alerting to establish a dynamic, reactive environment. Identifies tools and programs that best fit a workload and how best to incorporate them into system that meets requirements.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Developer Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Professional Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Operations Associate Certification
  • Operational Efficiency
  • Security and Compliance
  • Reliability and Resilience
Enterprise Architect Responsible for an organization's overall technology strategy. Often a C-Level executive accountable for budget, service availability, and other applicable business metrics. May be responsible for selecting cloud providers, sponsoring a cloud business office, and aligning the organizational structure to enable cloud deployments.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Developer Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Operations Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Enterprise Workloads Associate Certification
  • Operational Efficiency
  • Security and Compliance
  • Reliability and Resilience
  • Performance Efficiency and Cost Optimization
Infrastructure Architect Responsibile for matching application requirements to compute and storage capabilities. Accountable for the strategy and lifecycle of datacenter equipment including hypervisor, containerization, physical servers, block and file-based storage, and operating systems. May also be responsible for defining cloud Infrastructure as Code strategies, additional components such as object storage, and data migration strategies.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Professional Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Operations Associate Certification
  • Reliability and Resilience
  • Operational Efficiency
  • Security and Compliance
Network Architect Responsible for ensuring application connectivity is resilient, performant, and secure. Accountable for hybrid cloud connectivity, on-premises/WAN connectivity, ingress/egress connectivity, and lateral (East ↔ West) connectivity. May also be responsible for cloud VCN design, security group stategy, load balancer configuration, inter and intra-region peering, and FastConnect connectivity. Ensures capacity is available for steady-state workloads, and spikes caused by migration or data loads.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Operations Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Enterprise Workloads Associate Certification
  • Security and Compliance
  • Reliability and Resilience
Security Architect Responsible for ensuring application components are implemented securely. Accountable for defining strategies for intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, incident response, logging, data loss prevention, and regulatory compliance. May also be responsible for cloud IAM strategy, network security strategy, encryption, and secrets management.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Professional Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Operations Associate Certification
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Enterprise Workloads Associate Certification
  • Security and Compliance
  • Performance Efficiency and Cost Optimization
  • Operational Efficiency

Before You Begin

Learn more about getting started with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Adoption Framework.

To get the most from the cloud, your organization should follow a strategy that leverages experience-based recommendations for people, processes, and technology, with a phased approach to cloud transformation. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Adoption Framework provides best practices and a structured approach to help your organization successfully adopt the cloud.