This blog was last updated on 30 May 2018.
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Level exam combines two certification tracks into one. The Associate Level Developer & SysOps Administration exam merges into a single Professional Level exam. AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Certification Exam. This blog will share my experiences.
AWS Certification Exam Levels
Before the DevOps exam there was only a Solutions Architect track available at the Professional level (check out our blog to learn how to prepare for Solutions Architect – Professional Level). AWS has now made the Professional level complete with their DevOps engineer exam. AWS now offers three speciality exams, including Big Data, Security and Advanced Networking. Below is the updated chart.
Source: aws.amazon.com
About DevOps engineer – Professional Level Certification Exam
The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Level exam I took seemed to be a comprehensive exam that focuses more on automation. There were questions that covered both application deployment automation and infrastructure provisioning automation. Nearly all of the questions were scenario-based and intended to test your knowledge of AWS services that can be used to help organizations implement DevOps. Below are some details about the exam. There are some prerequisites that must be met before you can take the exam.
Pre-requisite
You must have obtained Associate Level certification in either AWS SysOps Administrator, or AWS Developer before you can appear for this certification exam. This is required in order to be eligible for the Professional Level DevOps exam. Practical experience is a great asset, as most of the questions are scenario-based.
Exam Overview
The DevOps certification exam costs $300 online with the Solutions Architect Professional Level certification exam. You may also be eligible for discount coupons at AWS public events.
There are approximately 80 multiple-choice questions. The exam does not require any writing or hands-on. The exam lasts 170 minutes. This exam was very long. The majority of the questions were very lengthy. If you don’t have a good eye for reading, it will be difficult to attempt all questions.
Exam Contents
Below are the exam domains along with the extent they are represented in this exam.
1.0 Continuous Delivery and Automated Process Automation (55%)
If you’re well prepared, this is the area that will help you score the highest. The questions revolved around CloudFormation or Elastic Beanstalk. They asked about a variety of implementation challenges, such as automating the provisioning of infrastructure with CloudFormation, configuring it with bootstrap actions, and deploying an application using Elastic Beanstalk. CloudFormation stack updates are important topics. Learn how to prevent certain resources from being updated in your template. Rolling updates and rollback using Elastic beanstalk with minimal or zero downtime were another area that was highly dominated. Also, how to use Route53 and Elastic Beanstalk together to perform A/B testing of environments/application versions. Although there were not many questions about SDK or CLI, if you have used either one briefly, you should be capable of answering them.
2.0 Monitoring, Metrics, and Logging (20%)
This section covered CloudWatch basics, such as setting up alerts, trigger actions, custom CloudWatch metrics and so on. CloudWatch Logs is also an important service that’s part the ex
