I passed the AWS Devops Pro certification examination back in early December, and I though I'd write a short blog post on my thoughts. I never looked up my score (just saw the 'pass'), but I thought that the exam was easier than I was expecting. The minimum passing score was 80%. The exam is 75 multiple choice questions in 170 minutes. I finished the exam with about 30 minutes left and I was pretty sure I passed, so I just submitted instead of taking any time to review answered questions.

That isn't to say that it is an easy test. It is very mentally taxing to go through the technical reading and weighing of 'best' answers for 75 questions. You need to have a good conceptual grasp of SDLC, CICD, and AWS services and best practices.

I used Stephane Maarek's Udemy course and Jon Bonso's practice tests as study material. I also built about 3 toy applications during my study time. I have only about 8 months of AWS experience (at my full time job), and I had all 3 associate certifications while having that experience.

I think that studying for this certification is great for intermediate level devops practitioners getting into AWS/cloud operations. It gives you a good level-set on AWS concepts and best practices. If you're completely new to IT this is probably too much, and if you're already very experienced, you also won't get much. Furthermore, this certification, and really any multiple choice test will not teach you practical dev/devops skills. It is very important to be building toy projects in order to develop new skills in a new domain, or to develop more advanced skills in a domain you already have experience in.

I've failed to stick to the 1 blog post per month, so I may do 2 this month. I'm currently working on a Velociraptor project, and I want to learn Terraform (as another way to deploy IaaS to an AWS backend), and get more advanced building with AWS Cloudwatch and other AWS platforms. These 3 builder projects should be done in the next 2 months or so.