In this blog, our DevOps architect, Vaibhav Kaushik at CloudZenia, shares his story on how he successfully and greatly became an AWS-certified DevOps engineer.

Vaibhav Kaushik – “I’ll share my experience of taking the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam, how I prepared for it, and some recommendations and resources for you to help you pass this exam.”

Who Should Take This Exam?

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam is intended for individuals with two or more years of experience provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments. Before you take this exam, AWS recommends you have:

  • Experience developing code in at least one high-level programming language; building highly automated infrastructures; and administering operating systems.
  • Understanding of modern development and operations processes and methodologies.
  • Ability to implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS.
  • Ability to implement and automate security controls, governance processes, and compliance validation.
  • Ability to define and deploy monitoring, metrics, and logging systems on AWS.

Understanding the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam

Exam duration180 minutes
Exam format75 questions; either multiple-choice or multiple-response
Cost300 USD
Test in-person or onlinePearson VUE testing centre or online proctored exam

Getting Ready for the Test

Familiarize yourself with the test and exam-style queries. The 180-minute AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam consists of 75 questions that must be answered. To put it simply, you have less than 2.5 minutes for every question to determine the answer or estimate the best possible response. 

To pass the test, you must receive at least 750 out of 1000 points.

Response Categories: The exam consists of two categories of questions:

  • Multiple Choice: This type consists of one correct answer and three incorrect options (distractors).
  • Multiple Responses: This type requires selecting two or more correct answers from five or more options.
  • Unscored Content: The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.

Timeframe of Certification

Certification through AWS is valid for three years from the date it was earned. Before the three-year period expires, you must recertify to keep your certification current and active.

Unlock 50% Off Your Next AWS Certification

As a reward for your hard work and dedication, AWS offers a 50% discount on your next certification exam after you successfully pass one. You can use your 50% discount voucher from the Benefits section of your AWS Certification Account to recertify or apply it to any future certification exam you wish to pursue.

Why Should You Take this Exam?

The exam focuses on automating software development lifecycle, policies, standards, high availability, and Disaster Recovery (DR). The knowledge you gain during the preparation will help you leverage the automation capabilities, in the right way and keep your deployments maintainable, secure, scalable, and resilient.

The exam focuses on the following six domains:

  • 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)

Official Exam Guide. Make sure to review the official AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam guide for an in-depth review of the Exam.

How to Prepare for this Exam?

I will go through all the steps I took to prepare for the exam and explain which ones worked for me:

  • Hands-on: As a next step, start doing labs to get a good understanding of all the integration steps that are required to achieve the exam objectives. This will help you the most in the entire preparation time. Some examples of labs that you should build are:
  • AWS DevOps Blog:
    The AWS DevOps blog has some really useful things and good diagrams that help you visualize the automation process.

What Did the Exam Ask?

All questions combine a couple of different AWS services and test your knowledge of how services can be integrated — for example, in a given scenario, you needed to know if you can use out-of-the-box remediation actions in AWS Config or if you need to intercept the events with CloudWatch rules and trigger a Step Function. If there is one service that comes up more than any other, it is CloudWatch — i.e. rules, alarms, custom metrics, and targets.

Recommendations for Exam Preparation

Familiarize yourself with all the DevOps tools offered by AWS, such as:

Understanding the concepts of fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and high availability is essential.

Before scheduling your exam, make sure to review the whitepapers provided by AWS. These are some important whitepapers provided by AWS :

  1. Running Containerized Microservices on AWS
  2. Implementing Microservices on AWS
  3. Infrastructure as Code
  4. Introduction to DevOps
  5. Practicing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery on AWS
  6. Blue/Green Deployments on AWS whitepaper
  7. Development and Testing on AWS
  8. Disaster Recovery of Workloads on AWS: Recovery in the Cloud
  9. AWS Multi-Region Fundamentals

Take Practice Exams

This is one of the most helpful steps; it will help you with learning time management but also to learn unfamiliar concepts and identify areas that need improvement.

Some of the Practice Tests are :

  1. Stephane Mareek’s Practice Test. [PAID]
  2. Neal Davis Practice Test. [PAID]
  3. John Bonso Practice Test. [PAID]
  4. Exam Topics Practice Set. [FREE]
  5. Shaping Pixel Youtube Videos. [FREE] 

Schedule and Take the Exam

Once you feel confident in your knowledge and preparedness, it’s time to schedule your exam. Visit the AWS Training and Certification website to book your exam appointment at a Pearson VUE testing center or opt for an online proctored exam from the comfort of your home or office.

Bonus Section

Additional Tips For the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam

The below services were most frequently encountered in the exam. They are central to many questions and scenarios and reflect their significant role in AWS DevOps practices. Having well-versed experience in these services will empower you towards a strong performance on the exam.

AWS Service Cheat Sheets

These cheat sheets serve as concise, yet comprehensive summaries of critical AWS services, useful for reviewing concepts and service functionalities in a time-efficient manner. The following are some of the best AWS cheat sheet resources out there that everyone should use.

Conclusion

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam is a challenging exam and requires a lot of in-depth knowledge about integrating AWS services and automating literally everything. There are some trade-off questions where you need to balance cost vs simplicity or performance degradations during deployments. Remember, the exam may seem daunting, but with the right resources, a solid study plan, and focus, you can conquer the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional exam, just as I did.

Thank you for reading, and I wish you the best of luck. In case you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me on my LinkedIn or drop your comments here and I would love to help.

To hear more such success stories, exam guides, and advice, visit our CloudZenia website and learn more and more!

Vaibhav Kaushik

Linkedin

Jul 11, 2024