What you need to know before going for the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Exam 2021 - Study Tips & Exam Review
Published: 2021-08-05 01:45:47

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I hardly write any blog posts highlighting my exam experiences during any of the certifications I have gone through. However, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional and Solution Architect - Profession exam are the two certification exams that are some how much different than other certifications out there in Cloud Computing. These are the two prestigious certifications I would say in a sense that these certifications are hard to achieve, lots of employers take these two certifications very seriously, and nevertheless AWS is maintaining the standard of the question patterns appearing in these exams so well that its hardly difficult to make an answer right by chance. Therefore, if someone passes any of these exams, its clearly ensures that he/she is really good at designing highly scalable, fault tolerant, secured and automated solutions in AWS.

Recently, I have cleared AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional exam with distinction (Scored 902, I didn't believe i did that well) and I would love to share my experience with you which might help to prepare for the exam as well. Though there are lots of other blogs out there highlighting this exam, i will try to make this post more or less different than others. Lets start this blog with couple of good news.
Good News:

* I found the exam questions are relatively simpler than what we have been told in most of the online courses or blog posts. What we know about this exam is that the questions to be appeared in the exam will be very long in length and even, each of the options for a given question will be very lengthy and complex itself. But what I have found was surprising for me. Most of the questions didn't go beyond three lines and was not too complex. Moreover, each of the options for most of the questions is finished in one line. I am not sure is that me who was lucky enough to get these types of questions or AWS has stepped back from having very lengthy and complex question pattern.

* Though you will have 75 questions to be answered in 180 minutes which seems too hard to achieve, you will not be running out of time. Thats what I believe. I answered all the questions well before time lapsed and i was able to score 900+.

* In most of the cases, out of all the options given for a question, its very likely that you can easily eliminate 1–2 options with ease.

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There are three things you need very badly to clear this exam:
* Hands-on Experience
* Hands-on Experience &
* Hands-on Experience

If you don't have enough Hands-on Experience, then you have to depend on others resources as mentioned bellow, but none of them can beat the importance of having Hands-on Experience.
* Re:Invent Videos (I hardly went through any Re:Invent videos for this exam)
* White-papers (I hardly read any white-papers for this exam)
* Blogs (Shouldn't be ignored, Try to read as much as AWS DevOps related blogs)
* Online Courses (I enrolled for few courses on Udemy and ACloudGuru. None of them are good enough to pass this exam, I would say. Therefore, I am not recommending any courses herefor this exam.)
* Exam Readiness Course for DevOps Exam (I haven't done it though.)

In short, what i am trying to say, if you have enough solid hands-on experience in dealing with various AWS DevOps projects, then no need to waste your time on watching 10+ hours long Udemy courses. Make your hands dirty as much as you can in dealing with various AWS DevOps related services. I will let you know some where in the bellow which AWS services this exam will heavily depend on.

Recommendation: Don't sit for the exam if you don't have at least 1 year of solid DevOps experience in AWS. There is literary no chance to pass the exam by luck.

Recommendation: Though there are lots of online courses out there in the market, Don't depend on those course to pass this exam. Those courses will just give you some high level knowledge on various AWS services. Rather, give more focus on getting hands-on experience on AWS DevOps related services. Below, I have highlighted the services that this exam will heavily depend on. You can also go through DevOps related blog published on AWS offical blog page. Those are really handy. I have created another blog post where i brought all those blog posts in one page. The link of my that blog post will be given somewhere at the bottom.

Recommendation: In some of other's blog post, I have seen they suggest to go through AWS Re:Invent Videos and white papers. Those are the great resource. However, I found its really hard to go through them especially if you have a full time job. Therefore, I entirely skipped them. If you have solid hands on experience in dealing with various AWS DevOps scenarios, you don't need to even go though those Re:Invent videos and white-papers. Nothing is more important than having hands-on experience for this particular exam. I can't stress enough more than that.

Recommendation: If you finish the exam well before 180 minutes, don't end the exam early. Instead, review as many questions as you can again and again until the time lapsed. In my case, i found couple of questions incorrectly answered which i corrected later on while reviewing them.
Recommendation: Trust me, 180 minutes will be enough to answer all the 75 questions. So, don't worry too much about running out of time. Hopefully, you will not run out of time during the exam. So, give enough time to each question. Don't rush. Some questions will kill lots of your time, may be even 4–5 minutes. Its absolutely OK, because some of the questions you can even finish in less than a minute. That's what my experience was during the exam.

Recommendation: Try to use the concept of 'Process of Elimination' during the exam. As i said before, In most of the cases, out of all the options given for a question, its very likely that you can easily eliminate 1–2 options with ease.

Recommendation:Though the passing score for the exam is 750 out of 1000, it doesn't mean that if you answer 75% questions right, you will pass. Its not like that. AWS uses a concept called 'Scaled Scoring' to calculate the exam score. AWS assigns different scores for different questions based on the level of its complexity. So, even if you make 85% questions right, you might still fail may be because you failed to answer the highly scored questions. So, my recommendation is -give equal importance on each question and don't think too much about AWS scoring system.

Recommendation: Following are the services that you need to know ins and out from the bottom of your heart and these are the services that will be heavily covered during the Exam. Let me know if i miss anything.

* AWS Elastic Beanstalk
* AWS EC2 AutoScaling
* AWS CodeCommit
* AWS CodeBuild
* AWS CodeDeploy
* AWS CodePipeline
* AWS Lambda
* AWS API Connect
* AWS Config
* AWS EventBridge
* AWS ECS
* AWS CloudFormation
* Serverless Application Model (SAM)

Recommendation: You have to know different deployment strategies by heart. You will expect lots of questions on deployment. Elastic Beanstalk application, CodeDeploy, and Lambda have different ways of deploying their applications like Blue/Green Deployment, Canary Deployment, Linear Deployment, Rolling Update, Immutable Deployment and so on. You need to know them all.

Recommendation: You will expect lots of multiple choice questions during the exam. Give enough effort on those questions. For me, those are the most trickiest questions as you need to select all the correct options.
Recommendation: Get a good grasp on Auto Scaling lifecycle hooks. You might expect atleast one question on Auto Scaling lifecycle hooks I guess.
Recommendation: You might see the following services in couple of questions. You don't need to have in depth knowledge of these services, rather I would say, a 10,000 foot overview of these services is good enough to clear those questions:
AWS X-Ray
AWS Step Function
Personal Health Dashboard
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Guard Duty
AWS OpsWork

Recommendation: Though the following AWS services are widely used by DevOps Engineers and AWS Developers, You don't need to worry about these services for this exam at all. Therefore, you can skip them entirely.
AWS CodeStar
AWS Cloud9
AWS CloudShell
AWS CodeArtifact
AWS AppRunner
Amazon DevOps Guru
Amazon CodeGuru
AWS AppConfig

Recommendation: I have created another blog posts (Click Here)where i listed all the DevOps related blogs post that you might go through to dig dive into the details of various AWS DevOps related services.

Click Here to open that blog post I have written
https://medium.com/r/?url=https%3A%2F%2Faseefahmed.medium.com%2Fmy-favourite-aws-blogs-e14aab7976dd

These blog posts will be extremely worthy if you thinking to sit for the AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Exam. I will update that page from time-to-time to include latest DevOps related blog posts from AWS. So, stay tune and keep yourself learning.

Recommendation: I am not going to suggest any online courses that might help you to pass the AWS DevOps professional exam. Because, there is literary no standalone courses out there that will help you clear the exam. However, I would like to share a link from where you can purchase a practice exam designed specifically for AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Exam.

Click Here to purchase practice exam:
https://medium.com/r/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fportal.tutorialsdojo.com%2Fcourses%2Faws-certified-devops-engineer-professional-practice-exams%2F

These are not the dump questions. So, don't expect these questions to be appeared during the exam. The reason why I am recommending this practice exam is that the questions covered here have gone through different DevOps scenarios that a DevOps Engineers might experience in their day-to-day challenges. Therefore, I do believe these kind of questions from this practice exam will help you a bit to understand how a typical DevOps engineer works. So, I would say, go for it.

Recommendation: Last but not the least. Though AWS now allows this exam to be taken at home, i would say try to avoid doing it from home. I took the exam at home and I had a bad experience. In the middle of the exam, while i was doing the exam, there was a technical problem and eventually, the proctor asked me to restart the laptop. Thus, I had to restart my laptop. I wasted my 10 minutes there and never get that 10 minutes back. 10 minute is not a big deal for Foundation and Associate level exams, but for DevOps Professional, even one minute is crucial. The worst part is, if the proctor asks you to restart the laptop, you will start panicking. Don't you? So, to stay in a safe side, do it at your local test center.
Thats's all that I want to share for AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional exam. Please let the community know if you have any other thoughts.

Follow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/aseefahmed/

This blog post was orignially write on Medium. Here is link of the original blog post:
https://aseefahmed.medium.com/what-you-need-to-know-before-going-for-the-aws-certified-devops-engineer-exam-2021-study-tips-c93837c02a03