On the 28th of March 2024, I passed the AWS DevOps Professional exam, a certification that I have been aiming for a while and thanks to some effort and tools I finally was able to receive its badge that is pursued by many. In this post, I would like to share my experience and point to some tips to help you achieve yours.
About the certification
As we know, AWS cloud certifications are a crucial step to upgrade your skills in cloud technology, be recognised for your talent, and increase your career opportunities in the engineering field.
The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional certifies professionals’ technical expertise in provisioning, operating and managing applications across the AWS platform. The exam is accessible for applicants with all technical backgrounds, although AWS recommends it, and I agree that applicants would need high experience in development, DevOps and CI/CD methodologies before taking it.
The exam has a total of 75 questions, and you will have 180 minutes (about 3 hours) to complete. I believe this is enough time although it is tight, so you won’t have time to review lots of your answers. The minimum passing score is 750 out of 1000 and will cost you $300 USD.
The exam has the following content domains and weightings:
- Domain 1: SDLC Automation (22% of scored content)
- Domain 2: Configuration Management and IAC (17% of scored content)
- Domain 3: Resilient Cloud Solutions (15% of scored content)
- Domain 4: Monitoring and Logging (15% of scored content)
- Domain 5: Incident and Event Response (14% of scored content)
- Domain 6: Security and Compliance (17% of scored content)
If you want to know more details about the contents, visit the Official Exam Guide for the breakdown.
Preparation
The exam is at an advanced level for professionals familiar with cloud and AWS concepts, so as pre-requisite you should start with the Associate level exams: AWS Certified Solution Architect and AWS Certified Developer. You are not required to take both, however, from my experience, having both helped to pave the way through the DevOps professional. Although, if you think both certifications are a hard path to follow, I recommend that you obtain at least the Developer Associate certification n before going after the DevOps professional.
Taking that into consideration, let’s start to prepare for the exam. There are multiple sources of material to support your study. The main sources I have used were the Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2024 NEW DVA-C02 by Stephane Maarek and the Exam Prep Enhanced Course: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional from AWS Skill Builder. Both content requires purchase, and if you find it difficult to invest in SkillBuilder, try to get the seven days free trial.
With the training content acquired, it is time to apply your best learning approach, which in my case is by writing. Despite taking a longer and occasionally tedious path, creating notes of the key points is the best way for me to understand and visualise any content. You might not feel that way, some people prefer just listening, others follow a more practical way by applying the content on AWS console. Therefore, I suggest that you find the best way and use it in your favour.
Training
Mock exams are an equally or maybe more important part of the study. It will help you to familiarise yourself with the exam format and get used to the time limit. By attempting mock exams, you will even get used to patterns of the questions and which answers are more likely to follow. I have done the following which were crucial to reach my achievement.
The first is the mock exam Full Practice Test – AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional – DOP-C02 by Stephane Maarek and Abhishek Singh. My take from this mock exam is that the questions are truthful with the exam format although part of the content requires some update. For example, the mock exam focuses lots of questions on Beanstalk configuration, deployment and remediation while, in the real exam does not reflect that. The number of questions regarding AWS Beanstalk were considerably lower. Thus, don’t focus only on this source. While you will still benefit a great deal, I’d suggest also looking for other additional sources to complete your training.
Another mock exam I have used – and I believe this was the closest and best content I have seen – was the mock exam from AWS Skill Builder: Exam Prep Official Practice Exam: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional. The content is close to the real exam and all answers and options are very well explained and linked to AWS articles which you help you familiarise even further with the AWS resources. Therefore, if you can get an AWS Skills Builder license or at least the seven days trial, it will be extremely beneficial and, in my opinion, I believe I would not have passed without it.
Key Points
After doing the exam, here is an overview of the key points I have noticed:
- Time is short and the questions are long. You need to keep concentration for 3 hours to not lose time. You won’t have time to review a lot of questions, be confident.
- Automation is the key for the exam:
- Automated deployments through AWS CodePipeline, study cases how to configure Cloud or Hybrid deployments.
- API Gateways & Lamba versions.
- Rollback automation.
- CI/CD is the focus, you will have to master this topic.
- AMI, AMI Image Builder, Golden AMI:
- Study scenarios of AMI copy and share across Regions, Accounts or Orgs.
- Automatic deployments of newly generated AMIs.
- Disaster Recovery:
- Understand which options are the most cost effective or most efficient among the scenarios proposed. Here is the tricky part from my view, questions about this topic were generally long and covered multiple AWS resources at the same questions (ALB, ASG, Serverless, CloudFormation, etc.). Thus, try skim reading and be confident in your answers.
- CloudFormation:
- Deployments, drift detection, and stack sets on AWS Organizations
- Did I mention IAM roles/policies? Well, I feel half of the exam covered permissions
- Notifications and automatic rollback:
- Be familiar with which AWS resources you need to trigger and filter to be notified about errors on deployments.
- Understand the difference between which resources, AWS managed rules, or Custom rules need to be filtered.
- AWS Config and SSM:
- SSM Session Manager, how to use it instead of SSH connections
- SSM Automation and Remediation: Be familiar with how to check AWS Config rules and how to automate a remediation. Example: “How to check EBS tagged volumes and how to be notified.”
- AWS Organizations, SCP’s, Control Tower and Landing zones:
- It is also a big topic covered on the exam.
- Be familiar with multiple account configuration and security limitations.
- Also expect questions regarding AWS Firewall Manager on Organizations.
- AWS EFS, about to one or two questions:
- Know how to share and mount EFS file systems across regions.
- AWS CodeArtifact:
- Know how to create or automate a deploy after a new version artifact is created.
- AWS Beanstalk covered just a few questions:
- Be familiar with different deployment strategies, and which one is the best according to different requirements such as cheaper, most effective.
- Step Functions:
- Tip: Look up the workflow keyword in the questions, is very likely the answer will be about Step Functions.
- SAM:
- SAM is often related to Lambda deployments, be familiar with the concept.
Conclusion
To summarise, AWS DevOps Engineer Professional is a hard exam. As I mentioned before, having the associate level certifications would be the best entry path into AWS cloud. And once you are ready to start into the professional level, take your time and practice skim reading. The questions are long, and you will need a lot of time to answer them. Concentrate, trust yourself in the process, and don’t give up if you don’t get it the first time, you will get there.
