1.1 Exam Logistics, the 2026 Blueprint & How to Use This Guide

What the Exam Is

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Professional exam, code 1Z0-997-26, leads to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Certified Architect Professional credential. Oracle describes the target candidate as someone with advanced knowledge and hands-on experience designing enterprise-scale solutions on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The exam checks whether you can choose and combine OCI services to build architectures that are highly available, secure, scalable, cloud-native, observable, and recoverable after a disaster.

The official learning path ("Become an OCI Architect Professional" on Oracle MyLearn) recommends a good understanding of core OCI services (Identity and Access Management, Networking, Compute, and Storage) and one to two years of hands-on OCI experience. There is no mandatory prerequisite exam, but Architect Associate knowledge is assumed throughout.

Exam Logistics at a Glance

A few policies from Oracle's certification FAQ and program guidelines matter on exam day:

• No free retake. Every sitting consumes one exam attempt, so a failed exam means applying another attempt.
• Rescheduling and cancellation must happen at least 24 hours before the appointment, or the attempt may be forfeited.
• A no-show counts as an attempt.
• Pen and paper are not allowed. The exam control panel provides a digital calculator and a whiteboard.
• After the exam, Oracle provides a score report with your total score, pass/fail status, and a breakdown of performance by exam domain, but it does not show which questions you missed.

The 2026 Blueprint

Oracle publishes five objectives and their weights for 1Z0-997-26. Converting the weights to the 50-question form gives a rough idea of how many questions each objective contributes. Oracle does not publish per-question weighting, so treat the counts as estimates.

The sixteen detailed sub-objectives name specific services:

1. HA and DR: scalable, resilient, highly available architectures for enterprise workloads, and Full Stack Disaster Recovery (FSDR) for automated cross-region failover.
2. Cloud-native: microservices, containerization, and DevOps with OKE, Container Instances, and OCI DevOps; image management with OCIR; serverless and Infrastructure as Code with OCI Functions and Resource Manager.
3. Security: layered security and governance; Bastion, Zero Trust Packet Routing (ZPR), and Network Firewall; Web Application Firewall (WAF), Certificates, and Key Management (KMS); Organizations Management.
4. Databases: Base Database Service and Autonomous AI Database; Autonomous Recovery Service; Globally Distributed Autonomous Database; OCI Cache.
5. Observability: Monitoring, Alarms, Notifications, and metric queries; Logging (service logs, custom logs, logging queries) and Audit logs; Connector Hub and OCI Search.

What Changed From Older Versions

Many third-party materials still describe older Architect Professional blueprints that emphasized hybrid networking (FastConnect and IPSec VPN), multicloud database services, and workload migration. Those topics are not separate objectives on 1Z0-997-26. Oracle now certifies them through other professional exams, such as the OCI Migration Architect Professional (1Z0-1123-26) and the Oracle AI Database@Azure, @AWS, and @GCP Architect Professional exams. Networking still appears in this exam, but mainly as a means to an end: routing traffic through a Network Firewall, isolating workloads with ZPR and network security groups, or placing a standby in another availability domain.

Scoring and Pacing Math

With 50 questions and a 68% passing score, you need about 34 correct answers if all questions count equally. Ninety minutes for 50 questions allows 1.8 minutes per question. A practical pacing plan:

• First pass (about 55 minutes): answer every question you are confident about and flag long scenarios.
• Second pass (about 25 minutes): return to flagged questions and eliminate options that break a stated constraint, such as an RPO, a "no public IP" rule, or a "least operational overhead" requirement.
• Final pass (about 10 minutes): make sure every question has an answer. A blank answer cannot earn credit.

How Professional Questions Are Written

Professional questions usually describe a business requirement and ask for the design that satisfies all constraints at once. Typical constraints are a recovery time objective (RTO), a recovery point objective (RPO), a compliance rule, a cost ceiling, or a requirement for the least operational effort. Two options often work technically. The correct one is the option that meets the stated constraint with a managed service and without unnecessary components.

How This Guide Is Organized

Each chapter follows the official course modules: HA and DR (Chapters 2–3), cloud-native solutions and Infrastructure as Code (Chapters 4–8), security (Chapters 9–12), databases (Chapters 13–14), and observability (Chapters 15–16). Every section ends with practice questions that use the same constraint-driven style as the real exam.