I am currently thinking about whether it would be interesting to sit this exam. DevOps is a topic dear to me. As for AWS, it’s a provider I am quite familiar with and currently has the largest market share in the cloud computing industry. Indeed, this is a very sought after credential and very valued by the market. However, I have to be very careful with what I commit to, as these days my available time is very scarce. Before I make this decision I thought about getting an overview of the topics covered. Whence, this article.
I start off by looking at the official Exam Guide. Below I copied the titles of the six sections and the second level headers to provide a concise overview of the topics.
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SDLC Automation
- 1.1 Apply concepts required to automate a CI/CD pipeline
- 1.2 Determine source control strategies and how to implement them
- 1.3 Apply concepts required to automate and integrate testing
- 1.4 Apply concepts required to build and manage artifacts securely
- 1.5 Determine deployment/delivery strategies (e.g., A/B, Blue/green, Canary, Red/black) and how to implement them using AWS services
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Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code
- 2.1 Determine deployment services based on deployment needs
- 2.2 Determine application and infrastructure deployment models based on business needs
- 2.3 Apply security concepts in the automation of resource provisioning
- 2.4 Determine how to implement lifecycle hooks on a deployment
- 2.5 Apply concepts required to manage systems using AWS configuration management tools and services
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Monitoring and Logging
- 3.1 Determine how to set up the aggregation, storage, and analysis of logs and metrics
- 3.2 Apply concepts required to automate monitoring and event management of an environment
- 3.3 Apply concepts required to audit, log, and monitor operating systems, infrastructures, and applications
- 3.4 Determine how to implement tagging and other metadata strategies
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Policies and Standards Automation
- 4.1 Apply concepts required to enforce standards for logging, metrics, monitoring, testing, and security
- 4.2 Determine how to optimize cost through automation
- 4.3 Apply concepts required to implement governance strategies
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Incident and Event Response
- 5.1 Troubleshoot issues and determine how to restore operations
- 5.2 Determine how to automate event management and alerting
- 5.3 Apply concepts required to implement automated healing
- 5.4 Apply concepts required to set up event-driven automated actions
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High Availability, Fault Tolerance, and Disaster Recovery
- 6.1 Determine appropriate use of multi-AZ versus multi-Region architectures
- 6.2 Determine how to implement high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance
- 6.3 Determine the right services based on business needs (e.g., RTO/RPO, cost)
- 6.4 Determine how to design and automate disaster recovery strategies
- 6.5 Evaluate a deployment for points of failure
This is all very exciting stuff. However, one needs to figure out how to practice this in an efficient and effective way to pass the exam. The topics are numerous and wide. Without a little bit of guidance, it’s easy to imagine spending an inordinate amount of time to cover everything. To cater for that, the following online resources were recommended:
- Whizlabs AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional
- Udemy AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional 2022 - Hands On!
- Udemy (Jon-Bonso) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Exams
- TutorialsDojo (Jon-Bonso) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Exams 2022
These resources should provide enough food for thought. I can see a plan birthing here. I will try each one of these and start with whichever feels better. As I go over the quizzes I will refer back to the FAQ on AWS which are of really high quality. After a few days of doing this after work, it should be clearer to me whether the time investment to pass the exam is reasonable or whether I will have to leave it for some future occasion (hopefully before my baby son turns 18 
)
