OK! It’s time to stop dithering, dilly-dallying, lolly-gagging, and procrastinating!!!! I’m going to start studying for the AWS Certified DevOps professional certificate!
Why are you blogging about it?
To keep myself honest (and to help me review while on the road), I’m going to be posting my study notes in blog-format here. This will help me out in several ways:
- Easy access to my notes from anywhere
- Saying this out loud will compel me to keep up & stay committed!
- Maybe it’ll help someone else out in their journey as well 🙂
As the intro article to a longer running series, here I will cover my process & study materials. Subsequent articles will cover domains, services, tools, etc…
Step 1: Read the Exam Guide
The exam guide has a wealth of information on what you are going to encounter on the exam and an overview of how to best prepare for it. While I encourage you to read it FULLY, here’s a brief overview.
| Domain | % of Exam |
| 1: SDLC Automation | 22 |
| 2: Config Mgmt & Infrastructure as Code | 19 |
| 3: Monitoring & Logging | 15 |
| 4: Policies & Standards Automation | 10 |
| 5: Incident & Event Response | 18 |
| 6: High Availability, Fault Tolerance & Disaster Recovery | 16 |
Step 2: What Services Will I Need To Know?
The exam guide then goes a bit deeper into each of the domains, explaining generally what you will need to know. I’ll put the domain specific items into future blog posts as a guide for the notes.
In the appendix of the exam guide is a list of the tools, technologies, and concepts that might be covered. What does that mean? It means review the AWS docs & whitepapers for the following:
- Analytics:
- Compute:
- Containers:
- Database:
- Developer Tools:
- Management and Governance:
- Networking and Content Delivery:
- Security, Identity, and Compliance:
- Serverless:
- Storage:
Yes… I know that’s a lot of reading 🙂
Step 3: Gather Third Party Study Material
We all know that AWS white papers are… dry. As such I’m going to complement my study process with a number of recommendations from friends, AWS Heroes, and work colleagues:
- Stephane Maarek’s Udemy course
- A Cloud Guru’s DevOps Pro learning Path
- Cloud Academy’s DevOps Engineer – Pro Cert Prep for AWS
- Prep Exams – there are a number of prep exams out there that purport to give you an inkling of what the real exam experience will be like. I’m going to try a few of them to see if that’s the case. If you know of any really good ones let me know!
- Someone just recommended the Jon Bonso prep exams at Tutorials Dojo… so going to check those out!
Next Steps
I think that the next article will cover Domain 1. I say “think” because this will be an evolving process as the domains and services interrelate A LOT. We will see how it goes once I actually get into the meat of the courses.