How I passed the AWS DevOps Professional exam

Pawel Piwosz
Nov 6 · 4 min read

My journey begins

My journey with AWS started in 2015. At the beginning I was using only S3 and Route 53, and only partially, as we utilized external tools for those services. The full engagement started later that year, and I decided to use Cloudformation from very beginning. Honestly, I would rather not see the first Cloudformation of mine 😉

Apart CloudFormation, my start was “classical”. EC2, S3, VPC, Route53, RDS, then ELB, Redshift, Lambdas, Autoscaling, and some other services.

With time, new services came in. There is no point listing them all. In the meantime, I attended the sysops course, but didn’t decide to go for a certificate.

A few companies later, I began my work for EPAM Systems and things were changed.

AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate

Preparations

The preparation process took me 3 weeks. I bought a course on Udemy (it was the one from ACloudGuru), and spent a lot of time reading whitepapers. My main focus was on Well-Architected Framework by AWS (https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/). And basically that’s all. I believed that my experience plus this short preparation period would be enough.

Exam

And… It was. I passed and achieved my first AWS badge.

The exam was tough, as AWS has a very specific approach to ask questions. You have two hours to answer over 60 questions. I was worried about time, but honestly, I finished around one hour ahead of schedule.

The exam covers a lot of services and good practices. All main services can be mentioned. EC2, ELB, VPC, Autoscaling, RDS, Lambdas, SNS, etc. And many of those questions demand from you to be extremally focused.

After the exam

After the SAA I wasn’t really convinced what to do. Should I do the Architect Pro? Or maybe SysOps Associate? Anyway, those days were in May, and I postponed the decision to the late months.

But then, I was asked if I wanted to try to pass DevOps pro. After a short hesitation I said “yeah, why not?!”. And I scheduled my exam on last days of October (which was postponed for a couple of days due to trainings I did for EPAM).

I felt the burden. Not only the exam is one of the hardest, but also, I need to pass to have it free 😊 So I made my preparations more effective.

Preparations for DevOps Professional

First, I read the description of the exam. I learned what is important for it (basically — everything). So, I bought a subscription on ACloudGuru. I decided to go through a few of courses there, to become more confident.

I repeated SysOps training as a warm-up. Then I went through DevOps one. And after this one I did the AWS CodePipeline (even if outdated). I had no time to attend to Serverless, unfortunately.

Those courses didn’t teach me much, but made my knowledge more systematic, and put my focus to some important areas.

Of course, I have read the whitepapers and available documentation.

And probably the most important thing. Tests. I did the test exam from ACloudGuru and sample questions from AWS multiple times. Again and again. And then read the explanations, understand the mistakes I made, and retake the test. And again. And again.

I’m pretty confident that I do not need to mention practice. Theoretical knowledge is not enough to pass.

AWS DevOps Professional exam

I wasn’t sure what would happen. I expected anything between 50% and 90%. And yes, my fears were right, the complexity of the exam is enormous. It is not unusual to have question for 10 lines of text, with 4 answers, 8 lines of text each, and the difference is one or two words in the middle. You have to be very careful and focused.

The exam covers everything related to DevOps work. Well, it is higher level to Sysops Associate and Developer Associate, plus DevOps specific things. And, yes, you can feel it during the exam. You have to know a lot of details about services, as the exam will challenge you with things you really cannot expect.

The duration of the exam is 3 hours. And you have to answer for 75 challenging questions. Funny thing, we had a power supply issue during the exam, but it didn’t affect my performance.

Having in memory my detailed score from the previous exam, during preparations I was focused on the main areas of the DevOps exam. And yes, it worked, as I got a very good score there. But I missed other areas, which surprised me. Anyway, I passed at the first attempt.

Conclusion

The conclusion is more about the DevOps exam, but is relevant for Architect as well.

- Read the documentation. More times than once, if possible. You need to be familiar with details. It is important.

- The exam covers a lot. I mean it. You can expect anything from Sysops (EC2, Load balancing, Autoscaling, RDS, VPC, S3, Route53, Replications, techniques, approaches), from Developer (Lambda, coding, etc), Devops (CodeStar, automation, Infrastructure as a Code), and also architect (approaches, strategies, etc). Even more, some security things, and many others. It is a really complex exam.

- Take test exam on AWS. It costs 40$ but believe me, it is worthwhile to test yourself.

- Although the ACloudGuru trainings are cool, DevOps course is not what you are looking for. Sorry guys. It covers… hm… 30, maybe 40% of basic things, where you need to have detailed knowledge. Anyway, their test exams are cool. Ok, they are focused on different areas. I can only say, that ACloudGuru test exams covered one technology in (around) 10 or more questions, and during the real exam… I had only one. I am not going to not say which service I’m reffering to.

- Whitepapers. Read them. For Sysops, for Developer, and for Architect. Do it, seriously.

- Know approaches, methodologies, etc. This exam will test you not only about your knowledge about AWS, but also about the practical knowledge about DevOps.

- And most importantly — practice. Practice, practice. You need to feel AWS. Without it, you can be almost sure, you will fail.

Last tip for the exam itself. Prepare yourself for 3 hours of maximum focus. Don’t allow yourself to lost it. One or two questions can decide if you pass or not.

And… Good luck 😊

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