Study guide for AWS DevOps - Professional Exam. Recommended for 2020 version.
This guide contains all the resources used, recommendations and tips for how to study for the AWS - DevOps Engineer Professional Exam.
Start by taking the following acloudguru course. This is a good overview of all the material covered in the exam. Remember, This is just an overview. It is, in no way, a comprehensive platform of all material needed to pass this exam. Starting your exam prep with this course will give you a good sense of the exam.
A Cloud Guru - DevOps Engineer Professional Course
The following Re:Invent videos cover a large chunk of the material that is in the exam. We recommend watching them at 1.5x the speed. 1.5x is fast enough to help get through the videos quickly yet slow enough to be able to comprehend the material.
Moving to DevOps the Amazon Way
Serverless Architecture and Best Practices
I didn't know Amazon API Gateway did that
Using DevOps, Microservices, & Serverless to Accelerate Innovation
Become a Serverless Black Belt: Optimizing Your Serverless Appli
Monitor All Your Things: Amazon CloudWatch in Action with BBC
These are to all the whitepapers I read, took notes of and reviewed closer to the exam. It is tough to actually read all of these as it is a lot of material. You may skim through them but you must be really attentive/focused as you do so. There is a lot of little details in these whitepapers; details that are crucial to passing the exam.
Running containerized microservices on AWS
Import Windows Server to Amazon EC2
AWS Development and Test on AWS
We highly recommend going through this amazing, short, FREE course created by AWS:
Exam Readiness: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
This course assumes that you have strong knowledge of the exam material. This course does not cover all the exam material. Instead, this course is about how to approach the different questions in the exam. It breaks down the thought process of those who answer these very challenging questions correctly. We recommend going through this course after you have gone through the above mentioned videos and whitepapers.
- Practice Exam: If you have previously taken an AWS exam, you have the benefit of taking a free practice exam. Go to your AWS Certification account > Benefits > Practice Exam and follow the prompts to set it up. This practice exam is vital. It contains a lot of material that is close to the material in the actual exam.
As you are studying for the exam, you will come across a lot of different AWS terminology and supporting information. Make a point of noting and researching the ones that you don't necessarily know and looking them up.
Here is a list of the ones that we have come across.
- Serverless Application Model (SAM)
- Caching on API Gateway
- Canary deployments on API Gateway
- Cloudformation Custom Resources
- ebextensions configuration files
- Customizing server for ElasticBeanstalk
- DynamoDB TTL
- S3 lifecycle policies with Tags
- CodeDeploy on on-premise instances
- Using SSH Keys in codecommit
- Trusted Advisor - Service limits
- Config - All the rules
- Codebuild Artifacts
- Different cloudformation functions
- cfn-init, cfn-signal, cfn-metadata and cfn-hup files for cloudformation
- Cloudformation stack policies
- Autoscaling lifecycle with hooks
- EC2 instance user data
- Codecommit
- COdebuild
- Codedeploy
- Codepipeline
- Cloudformation
- Opsworks
- Lambda
- API Gateway
- X-Ray
- Config
- Trusted Advisor
- Cloudwatch Events
- Cloudwatch Logs
- Elasticache
- ElasticBeanstalk
- ECR
- ECS
- DynamoDB with DAX
- RDS
- EC2
- Route53
- Cloudfront
- Auto Scaling and Load balancers (Heavy emphasis on this)
- Certificate Manager
- Systems Manager
- Service Catalog
- Kinesis Datastreams vs Firehose
- GuardDuty
- AWS Server Migration
- AWS SSO
- Cost Optimization over all
- Keep track of time
- Read both the question and answer in full
- Identify the key words in the question and make sure to satisfy ALL requirements of the question. Two answeres may be very similar but a detail in the question will set them apart.
- Spot the distractor/silly answers. Move on quickly from these.
- Watch out for mental exhaustion. If you feel this, close your eyes and take 5 deep breaths.
- The questions will not be super clear. It's ok to make some assumptions.
- An answer that says "Don't do anything", is not the right answer.
- Avoid answers that have you doing manual commands/process.
- Some answers would not be the best way to do things but could still be right.
- Focus on simplest, most technically correct answers
Request: If you study for this exam and pass, please add your experience to this repo to help your colleagues. Good luck in your exam!!