Category: AWS Certified DevOps Professional

29-08-17

On By chrisbeckettIn AWS, AWS Certified Developer Associate, AWS Certified DevOps Professional, AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, AWS SpecialtyLeave a comment

AWS Certification – Changes To Resit Policies?

 

 

As I tweeted at the end of last week, I failed the AWS Advanced Networking exam on Friday and I was looking earlier to see when I could reschedule this and jump back on the horse. Originally when I first started sitting AWS exams back in the dark depths of December 2015, you could sit an exam three times before you had to wait 12 months to sit it again.

As you can imagine, sitting my SA Pro exam at the third time of asking was pressure enough but also to have that sword hanging over my head just made the situation practically unbearable. I’m pleased to note that when I logged into the Training and Certification portal this morning, the resit policy has been relaxed quite a bit. From three attempts in a single year, all exams now have the following terms :-

  • You can sit any AWS exam a total of 10 times (Initial sitting plus 9 retakes)
  • You must wait 14 days after any failed attempt before you can register for a resit
  • The maximum number of exam sittings in a 12 month period seems to have been removed

This is a much better approach for test sitters and takes some of the pressure off. It also makes sense from AWS’s point of view as they can generate more revenues from exams now. I’m not sure when this policy changed (I quickly Googled it and found nothing), but it’s well worth knowing if you’re sitting any exams soon.

As regards the maximum sittings in a single year, if you need more than 10 attempts, it’s probably safe to say you should consider something a bit different. 😉

Screen grab from the T&C portal showing the new resit policy for all exams

 

31-12-16

On By chrisbeckettIn AWS, AWS Certified DevOps Professional, Cloud1 Comment

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional – Exam Experience & Tips

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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).

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