AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional: My exam experience

Hey, what’s up? 👋🏻

After two heavy exams in terms of studying and effort applied to it, I decided to retake the DevOps Engineer Professional exam, as my old one had expired. Most of the topics covered in the exam is in my comfort zone, with resources that I’ve used a lot in the last years, so it allowed me a more calm and soft preparation.

The AWS DevOps Engineer Professional exam

I took the exam online, at home, and I finished around 2h15m. With a total of 75 questions, the score needed to pass the exam was 750, and I scored 866 🏅

The exam was exactly how I remembered: long and mentally exhausting. The exam presents long questions with long and similar answers, so you choose the one that meets the proposed requirement. My tip on this is, in addition to paying attention to the question, pay attention to the last sentence of the question, which usually states a requirement that will guide your answer, for example: “What is the more cost-effective of addressing the scenario?”.

In my opinion, you must be comfortable with the following topics for this exam:

• AWS DevOps pipeline stack (CodeCommit included.. RIP 🪦)
• AWS CloudFormation. You must be comfortable with the many operators, functions and best practices on writing AWS CF.
• Understand the lifecycle hooks performed during the new version release on AWS Autoscaling Group, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda and Elastic Container Services (ECS)
• EventBridge: Needs to know how to use subscription and metric filters.
• Automations using AWS Config + AWS SSM
• AWS OpsWorks (I know, it’s deprecated, but…)

Remembering that these are the most specific topics I can think of, if you want to know everything that is covered in the exam, you should read the Exam Guide, available on the official certification page: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional.

How I studied

For this exam, I’ve already bought the Whizlabs practice exams the first time I did the exam, so I used it again to prepare my self.

Any questions? Let me know 📲