The AWS DevOps Professional certification
What value do certifications have? What services are covered and how could you go about studying for it?
I joined AWS Amsterdam September 2019 and left about 3 and a half years later. That time gave me a perspective on AWS’ services and tools that’s hard to get from the outside looking in.
Working with AWS Professional Services means you should be the AWS expert any room you walk in. Certifications gives you a quantifiabel metric to show your expertise. However.. it depends on how you achieve them.
Since September 2019 i’ve achieved 9 AWS certifications (Which yes.. does include the Cloud Practitioner). There’s two ways to get one:
Study all the online resources (see tips section) and take all the time you need. Carefully plan the study materials and take your exam accordingly. Aim for a 1000/1000 score.
Just take the exam
The difference between studying and taking boils down to this: Taking an exam validates knowledge. By studying everything you’re not validating what you know but what you have learned.
However, just taking an exam is scary: you might fail. Doubling down; the chance of failure is high. This requires a culture of experimentation that should be accepted by your environment. At AWS for example, I failed multiple exams and think that is totally OK. Another angle that should be taken into consideration is your employers leniancy towards expensing exams. You should never personally pay for you AWS exam. It’s an asset for your employer to have certified employees.
The AWS DevOps Professional certification
The AWS DevOps Professional certificate is all about provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application systems on the AWS platform.
What tools do I use for studying?
I’ve used LinuxAcadamy in the past which has since been absolved into ACloudGuru. It’s not the cheapest but you get the quality for it.
On top of that, I would recommend buying an exam question set from Whizlabs. Don’t try to remember the exact questions but it will give you a feeling of how long questions are and how long an exam will take you.
There’s a bunch of other tools available that other people would recommend to you but I’d say that these two should be plenty. Take ACloudGuru for unkown services and use Whizlabs for some practice. Just take the exam.
What services should you pay extra attention to?
This is the worst part of this post. These services change all the time and remembering all the ins-and-outs is not important. Remember? Validating your current knowledge vs what you can learn.
However, since people are always interested in an extra take. These are the services I would recommend taking an extra look at:
AWS System Manager suite
Patching
Run Commands
Parameter Store
Image Builder
AWS OpsWork
I’ve never used this before but seems to be important for customers that manage their own infrastructure
AWS CI/CD tools: CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodeCommit
How can you do CI/CD exclusively on AWS?
AWS Secret Manager
How do you handle secrets, how does it work with KMS
AWS AppRunner
New service, shiny service, pushed in the exam
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