Last year, I felt that it was time to have more certifications. I have a Developer Associate certificate, so getting a Solutions Architect Associate one should not be an issue. I was wrong. It took time to get into the flow of the studying. Passing exams is a skill you should develop through an effective routine and development mindset.
Recently I went to certification on DevOps professional. My background is in Development mostly. However, I spent my time setting up environments and infrastructure during recent years. It is worth mentioning that my typical stack includes AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, API Gateway, and SNS/SQS. Here is my list of tips and materials for passing your DevOps professional certificate. You could combine them in any order.
General recommendations. Do not underestimate the content, syllabus, and time during the exam preparation. Sitting on the exam for 3 hours could be challenging. I took the exam in the Pearson VUE accredited test center. I got two A4 papers for writing. With the online option, you will not have a chance to write anything. The notes during the exam helped to map the question and refresh it during the review part.
Pass SysOps Administrator
Try to focus on on monitoring, deployments. This exam will benefit the parts regarding deployments, auditing, and monitoring. Take 1-2 months for the DevOps preparation.
Read whitepapers
I was skipping them during associate ones. They build the correct mindset towards implementation on how to follow AWS practices. I advise you to read them before sleep. Here is the official list
Main Course
Complete one course with Labs. Any platform will work. There are plenty of them, but the most accessible ones are ACloudGuru or CloudAcademy. Making quick hand-written notes is helpful on the last days before the exam.
Use Skill Builder
It is a new official online learning platform from the AWS itself. The quality of the content is outstanding. One drawback is that you need to register but it is for free.
I recommend these courses:
- Getting Started with DevOps on AWS
- AWS Certification Official Practice Question Sets (sample test is free now for any of the exams)
- Exam Readiness: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional
Train yourself
Sit the actual 75 questions in one go (TutorialsDojo practice exams or the one at the end of the course). Do not be demotivated by the results of the practice exams.
Topics and services to concentrate on: Beanstalk, Config, Trusted Advisor, Auto Scaling, CloudFront, CodeDeploy, Systems Manager, S3, Logging, CloudTrail, CodeCommit.
If you have a couple of days before an exam - concentrate on the most complicated areas. Read tutorialsdojo's cheatsheets. They are enormously helpful.
- Config (cheatsheet)
- CodeDeploy (cheatsheet)
- Deployment tools comparison (cheatsheet)
- Installation of CodeDeploy Agent (video)
- Systems Manager (cheatsheet)
Physical aspect
Sleep well, do physical exercises, spend time outdoors. Take a break during the exam for standing and stretching. Avoid consuming too much caffeine and sugar especially in the last week before the exam. In the end, all of these factors accumulates into tiredness and lack of concentration. For improving focus, it is nice to do meditation or yoga.
The exam is challenging, but you could become an AWS-certified professional with extensive preparation and discipline. If you could learn at least one lesson from this article, it would mean for me that it was worth sharing. Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter also:
Top comments (7)
Thank you. Very interesting
Happy that you enjoyed it
Yeah, the exam is quite challenging (imagine the power failure during the exam ;) I do not need to imagine it ;P), and the most valid advice - it is best to have a hands-on experience.
yep, completely agree on that!
Labs and real-life experience is helpful.
For example, I played a lot with CI/CD in CodePipeline. I worked with Jenkins and GitHub Actions. This is a great start for the DevOps exam.
However, the parts with EC2 and Auto Scaling were possible for me only because of the lab experience in CloudAcademy course.
Great helpful tips @grenguar
I am happy to help!
yoga?