AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional – Exam Experience & Tips

I managed to find the time yesterday to sit the above exam before the end of the year to reach my goal of holding all five current AWS certifications. There isn’t a lot out there about this exam, so as usual I thought I would try to pass on the benefit of my experiences for others planning to sit this one.

The exam is 80 questions over 170 minutes. I finished with about 20 minutes to spare and passed barely with a 66%, but as we always say – a pass is a pass! Looking back over the score report, there are four domains tested in the exam:-

• Domain 1: Continuous Delivery and Process Automation
• Domain 2: Monitoring, Metrics, and Logging
• Domain 3: Security, Governance, and Validation
• Domain 4: High Availability and Elasticity

I managed to score really well on domains 1, 3 and 4 (between 75% and 85%0, but really bombed on domain 2, which really surprised me. This domain focusses mainly on CloudWatch, so it goes without saying that I didn’t know it as well as I thought I did!

Like all the other AWS exams, the questions are worded in a very specific way, and it can take time to read and re-read the questions to truly understand what is being asked. I wouldn’t worry too much about time running out, some of the questions are quite short but you need to look for key words in the questions – such as “cost-effective”, “fault tolerant” and “efficient”. This can help you rule out the obviously incorrect answers.

In terms of what you need to know, I’d say the following :-

• Domain 1: CloudFront (templates, custom resources), OpsWorks (lifecycles), Elastic Beanstalk (platform support, scaling, Docker), SQS, SNS, Data Pipeline (I was surprised to see this feature in the exam as I figured it was being phased out in favour of Lambda), SWF, bootstrapping
• Domain 2: CloudWatch, CloudTrail (what it can and can’t do), CloudWatch Logs (Log streams, Log filters, Log agent), EMR
• Domain 3: IAM (Roles, users, STS, AssumeRole(s))
• Domain 4: Load balancing, auto scaling, EC2, S3, Glacier, EBS, RDS,  DynamoDB, instance types

And for what I used for study, use your AWS account and the free tier entitlement to much around with all the services. There are loads of walkthroughs in the documentation and provided you don’t leave massive instances running 24/7 it should only cost you pennies to use.

The A Cloud Guru course is well worth the investment of time and money – Adrian and Nick do a great job of taking you through most of what you need to know for the exam. I did find that there wasn’t as much DynamoDB content on the exam as I was expecting, not that I’m complaining because a lot of how it works still really mashes my head!

There are lots of good videos on YouTube, from Re:Invent conferences from years gone by which go into a lot of depth. I can also recommend Ian Massingham’s CloudFormation Masterclass video as a good refresher/primer for CF.

Difficulty wise, it’s definitely a tough exam, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. 80 questions is a lot and many of them are very verbose in both the question and the answers. I’d say it’s not as tough as the Solutions Architect Pro as it doesn’t cover as broad a range of topics, but you can’t really wing it.

I hope this article helps anyone doing this exam any time soon. I’m going to enjoy being part of the “All 5” club for as long as it lasts (the three “Specialty” exams are coming up early next year, I’ve registered to sit all the betas).