How I cleared AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional
Tags: cloud, awsdevops, devops, awsexam
Published: 2023-03-30 20:51:16

---
title: How I cleared AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional
published: true
date: 2022-04-24 05:54:56 UTC
tags: cloud,awsdevops,devops,awsexam
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---

### How I passed AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional

It was an exciting day for me as I passed the AWS Certified DOP exam. It was the toughest exam that I have experienced and I had been preparing it for more than two months.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/300/1*TRDKjYrom9t0YZeoneq81Q.png)

I have to say thank you to the contributors of the learning resources from AWS, YouTubers and Blog Writers. Special thanks for the course instructed by Stephan Maarek on Udemy with lots of hands-on videos.

I have 4+ years experience on AWS but during preparation for this exam, I still learned a lot. The key thing (difference from associate level) for this exam is that it requires lots of hands-on experience. There are quite a lot of tools and services on AWS I had never played with but the best way to understand it is to USE it.

I spent a lot of time on Elastic Beanstalk to deploy web applications and integrated it with AWS developer tools such as CodeDeploy/Code Pipeline for automating and testing the deployment strategies. Also, during the learning, I read the article for Golden AMI pipeline. Instead of just reading it through, I did build it myself using SSM and Inspector. I believe even if you work in the Cloud domain for very long time, you are still possibly not be able to know all the services that the exam requires. Do hands-on as much as possible, and you will finally find it easy and get it well-prepared.

There are six domains for this exam and it covers quite a lot of services as below. Make sure you know all the services included and understand how these services work together to solve practical problems.

[AWS-Certified-DevOps-Engineer-Professional\_Exam-Guide](https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-devops-pro/AWS-Certified-DevOps-Engineer-Professional_Exam-Guide.pdf)

**_SDLC Automation_**

AWS Developer Tools (CI/CD)— CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy and CodePipeline (Very Important)

CodeBuild can be used as Jenkins slave(worker) node

**_Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code_**

CloudFormation (Very Important. Difference between nested stack and cross-stack reference)

Elastic Beanstalk (Very Important. Deployment methods: pros and cons)

OpsWorks (I have done too much hands-on on it)

Lambda and API Gateway (Understand how serverless works and benefit and limitation)

Elastic Container Service (Very big topic and lots of concepts)

IAM (Very Important)

**_Monitoring and Logging_**

CloudWatch (Very Important. Metrics/Logs/Events/Alarms…)

CloudTrail (Very Important.)

Kinesis

OpenSearch (successor of Amazon ES. Just use this when searching required)

Tagging

X-Ray (Understand what it is used for)

**_Policies and Standards Automation_**

Systems Manager (Very Important.)

Config (Compliance and Non-Compliance)

Service Catalog

Inspector

Health

Trust Advisor

GuardDuty

Macie

Secret Manager (Comparison with SSM Parameter Store)

**_Incident and Event Response_**

CloudWatch (AGAIN!!!! Very Important! Work with a lot of services)

**_High Availability, Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery_**

Auto-Scaling Group (Understand Multi-tier Architecture)

Elastic Load Balancer

DynamoDB

RDS (Aurora is special!!! Please don’t ignore it.)

AWS Organization

### Learning Materials

The course I use is [<AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional 2022 — Hands on!>](https://www.udemy.com/share/101WpU3@mrbSgBNNyEZlf4WDzn2GDiMYMHde369gO7MB4eqP9u0CQjSnxk_xbznwbZg8DYyk/)on Udemy which is instructed by Stephan Maarek. There are lots of hands-on demos in this course that gave me a very straight-forward view on how to use the services.

I read a lot of AWS documents and mainly focus on the **white papers** and service **FAQs**. And [Jayendra’s blog](https://jayendrapatil.com/) is getting much more popular!

AWS provides free courses on AWS Skill Builder for this exam. Please do take it as an add-on or a knowledge check. You will get nothing to lose.

Practice test is also very necessary from my own perspective. I have done two tests on [AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Exams](https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-devops-engineer-professional-practice-exams-amazon/) from Jon Bonso and one test on [Practice Exam | AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional](https://sparknz.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-devops-engineer-professional-practice-exam-dop/) from Stephan Maarek. I failed all the three tests for the first try and could not have done it within 3 hours. However, I took these questions as my checklists and deep dive into all of them and understand why the answers are correct and the rest are incorrect.

There are always multiple ways to solve one problem, but as a professional DevOps engineer, you need to find out the easiest, the most cost-optimised, the most secured or most efficient one, etc.

### Finally

Hope this is helpful for your preparation and wish you good luck on your exam.

I will prepare another blog about the notes I made during my preparation soon. Please follow me if you want to get yourself notified.

Feel free to comment and your questions are always welcomed.

Harry Z @ NZ