How I cleared AWS Certified DevOps Professional Certification-2024

This certification exam is considered one of the most tough exam to clear as this requires you to have minimum 1+ years of experience working with AWS and DevOps.

I have read few reviews and in some tutorial that you can still pass the exam if you take up the XYZ course and complete n number of mock exams. Unfortunately this is completely NOT true.

Since the exam require your critical thinking and every questions are scenario based. There will be choices which looks to be much similar and you would end up selecting either of them which best match but turns out the answer would not be either of them. :)

My recommendations:

1. Do NOT appear for the exam if you do not have enough enough and enough preparation. You will face tough time during the exam. Do not hurry and chase for certification. Instead, sit for study distraction free and focus on each topics, AWS services and why they are used. Say- what is the purpose of AWS Config, why are they used and where and what problems does this solve. This way it will give length and breadth of the understanding the service.

2. Stick to one material for course. You might be tempted to learn from multiple sources - like Udemy, Youtube and any other courses available. I won't say they are not good. They are excellent but once you understand the concepts from 1 course do not waste more time learning same thing from other courses. This will eventual make you more worried about the exam.

3. You must take Mock exams from multiple sources. This is contradiction to the above point(2) but this is essential. Attempting more test papers will make your awareness more about the kind of questions being asked and you end up getting similar or somewhat close questions in the actual exams. I have also seen people trying to save money and relying on FREE materials for mock exams online. Trust me this confuse you even more. I have felt that myself. I initially looked for free dumps online but they differ to much in the answer they provide. Instead invest in good practise paper available. I have provided some at the end. They are really impressive. And trust me without enough practise test you simply cannot appear for the actual exam.

4. Practice discipline. You must know that actual exam will be 180 minutes long (~3hrs) and you have to answer 75 questions in total. Remember that these questions are not direct questions and compeltely scenario based so each questions will be paragraph long. To make yourself ready and not get burned down you have to practice to make your mind to be discplined and focused. I used to switch off the cell phone during practice exams and remove any distration from my workspace. Usually try to give these exams when your completely free from your office work or household chores, preferably during night as it would be less noise. And this is really important as you might be tempted to scroll through your phone or go off from your desk after having completed 10-15 or 20 questions , but dont as this will be break your momentum.

5. Now which topics to focus. As this exam mostly tests your DevOps and SDLC abilities you need to focus not only on the core DevOps and CICD services but also other services that are linked to it like S3, IAM, route53 etc.

AWS CICD Services :

• CodeCommit
• CodeBuild
• CodeDeploy
• CodePipeline

Know about how to deploy across region using codedeploy and codepipeline

• Cloudformation : Cross deployment stack and change sets
• Elastic Beanstalk : Know about various deployment strategies
• CloudWatch, EventBridge & CloudTrail - Know the difference between where to use Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail and Elas
• AWS Organization
• AWS Catalog
• AWS Health

These are some services to know deeply about it, however since other services like API Gateway, Lambda, ELB etc will be linked so those need to be focused as well.

References:

1. Course:

• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional 2024 - DOP-C02

1. Practice Sets

• Practice Exams | Stephane Maarek

• Practice Exams | Neal Davis

• Practice Exams | testpreptraining
  

Finally

Since you read till here, I hope this post must be some useful to your prep journey. At last, I would also like to tell you that certification are good only if you have good knowledge of the domain. Do not rush for certification, take time to understand the domain and apply those knowledge that you learned.

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashif-eqbal/