Detailed Review Of Preparation

To start with .... 

The test is super hard. The exam is long and tiring (3 to 3.5 hours) with 75 scenario-based and problem-based questions with long answers which all seem to be correct. After 35–40 questions your brain starts melting down and it hurts when you try to think and analyze.

I was supposed to give it by last DEC-2019 but it was postponed due to my personal loss (I lost my daughter and she passed away with pulmonary hypertension) so kept on reading on and off but am dedicated to this as I love being ‘AWSome’ always ..  Finally, I took the exam in APR 28^th, 2020 and passed.

Used to read the question and use paper and pencil to draw a rough architecture and focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach to the right answer or at least have a 50% chance of getting it right.

The only thing is it is brain drainer and need lot of patience and calm down during the exam not to lose focus.  Fun to be challenge and accept them so that you will be surprised with outcome that you produce.

It covers a lot of concepts and services related to Automation, Deployments, Disaster Recovery, HA, Monitoring, Logging and Troubleshooting. It also covers security and compliance related topics. I did score well out of all the 6 domains except one domain (Incident and event response- Needs an improvement) and rest all are meet competencies.  The % of scored domains are:

SDLC automation (21.5%), Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code (18.5%), Monitoring &Logging (15.4%), Policies & Standards (10.8%), Incident and event response (18.5%), HA,DR section(15.7%)

Be sure to cover the following topics

Whitepapers are the key to understand Deployments and DR

·         Blue Green Deployments

·         Disaster Recovery

·         Architecting for the Cloud: Best Practices

·         Building Fault-Tolerant Applications on AWS

Management Tools

·         DevOps professional exam cannot be cleared without the knowledge of this topics

·         Deep dive into CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks

·         Very important to understand CloudFormation vs Elastic Beanstalk vs OpsWorks

CloudFormation

·         Have in-depth understand of CloudFormation concepts

·         Know how to indicate completion of events using CloudFormation helper scripts.

·         Understand CloudFormation deployment strategies esp. rolling and replacing update with AutoScaling and update of launch configuration

·         Elastic Beanstalk

·         Understand Elastic Beanstalk overall – Applications, Versions and Environments

·         Understand Elastic Beanstalk Deployment Strategies esp. the rolling, immutable and blue/green deployment

OpsWorks

·         Understand OpsWorks overall – stacks, layers, recipes

·         Understand OpsWorks Lifecycle events esp. the Configure event and how it can be used.

·         Understand OpsWorks Deployment Strategies

Development Tools

·         Unlike the previous DevOps Engineer – Professional exam, the latest pattern has a heavy focus on the Developer tools and be sure to deep dive into them

·         Understand CodePipepline, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CodeBuild and their uses cases

·         CodePipeline

·         Understand how to build Pipelines and integration with other Code* services

·         Understand CodePipeline pipeline structure (Hint : run builds parallelly using runorder)

·         Understand how to configure notifications on events and failures

Monitoring & Governance tools

·         Very important to understand AWS CloudWatch vs AWS CloudTrail vs AWS Config

·         Very important to understand Trust Advisor vs Systems manager vs AWS Inspector

·         Know Personal Health Dashboard & Service Health Dashboard

·         CloudWatch

·         Deep dive CloudWatch

·         Understand CloudWatch logs

·         Understand CloudWatch Subscription Filters and its integration with other services.

·         Understand CloudWatch Events

·         Networking, Security, Storage and Database domain areas too

Resources:

aws.training website, AWS whitepapers, blogs, webinars, practice tests and Udemy courses too. Pluralsight.com is also free sometimes they give us free month. good to read those. You need to practice and draw the underlaying architecture components for every scenario which will solve the puzzle faster.