AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C01) Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C01) exam is the upgraded pattern of the DevOps Engineer – Professional exam which was released last year (2018). I recently attempted the latest pattern and AWS has done quite good in improving it further, as compared to the old one, to include more DevOps related questions and services.

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C01) exam basically validates

Implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS
Implement and automate security controls, governance processes, and compliance validation
Define and deploy monitoring, metrics, and logging systems on AWS
Implement systems that are highly available, scalable, and self-healing on the AWS platform
Design, manage, and maintain tools to automate operational processes

Refer to AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam Guide

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C01) Exam Summary

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam was for a total of 170 minutes but it had 75 questions (I was always assuming it to be 65) and I just managed to complete the exam with 20 mins remaining. So be sure you are prepared and manage your time well. As always, mark the questions for review and move on and come back to them after you are done with all.
One of the key tactic I followed when solving the DevOps Engineer questions was 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 atleast have a 50% chance of getting it right.
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam 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.
Be sure to cover the following topics
- Whitepapers are the key to understand Deployments and DR
- 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
    - Understand CloudFormation policies esp. Update and Deletion policies (hint : retain resources on stack deletion)
    - Understand CloudFormation Best Practices esp. Nested Stacks and logical grouping
    - Understand CloudFormation template anatomy – parameters, outputs, mappings
    - Understand CloudFormation Custom resource and its use cases (hint : you can use Custom resource to retrieve AMI IDs or interact with external services)
  - Elastic Beanstalk
    - Understand Elastic Beanstalk overall – Applications, Versions and Environments
    - Understand Elastic Beanstalk Deployment Strategies esp. the rolling, immutable and blue/green deployments
    - Know Custom AMIs can be supported
    - Know Elastic Beanstalk offers Docker support
  - 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
    - Know OpsWorks auto-healing and how to be notified for it.
  - 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
      - Know CodePipeline supports Manual Approval
    - CodeCommit
      - How to handle deployments for code. (Hint : Same repository and branches for projects and environments)
      - Know CodeCommit IAM policies
    - CodeDeploy
      - Understand CodeDeploy Lifecycle events hooks
      - Understand CodeDeploy deployment configurations (hint : supports canary and linear deployment)
      - Understand CodeDeploy redeploy and rollbacks
- 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
    - Understand CloudWatch supports custom metrics
    - Know how to monitor AWS managed and on-premises instances
    - Know you can triggers events using CloudWatch scheduled events.
  - CloudTrail
    - Understand CloudTrail for audit and governance
    - Understand how to maintain CloudTrail logs integrity
  - Understand AWS Config and its use cases (hint : Config maintains history and can be used to revert the config)
  - Know Personal Health Dashboard (hint : it tracks events on your AWS resources)
  - Understand AWS Trusted Advisor and what it provides (hint : low utilization resources)
  - Systems Manager
    - Systems Manager is also covered heavily in the exams so be sure you know
    - Understand AWS Systems Manager and its various services like parameter store, patch manager
- Networking & Content Delivery
  - Networking is covered very lightly. Usually the questions are targetted towards Troubleshooting of access or permissions.
  - Know VPC
    - Understand Security Groups, NACLs (Hint : know NACLs are stateless and how it is reflected in VPC Flow Logs)
    - Understand VPC Flow Logs and what information it provides
  - Route 53
    - Understand Route 53
    - Understand Routing Policies and their use cases Focus on Weighted, Latency routing policies
  - Understand CloudFront and use cases (hint : S3 caching)
  - Load Balancer
    - Understand ELB, ALB and NLB
    - Understand ELB with Auto Scaling (hint : ELB with Auto Scaling for blue/green deployments)
- Security, Identity & Compliance
  - Identity and Access Management
    - Understand IAM Roles and use cases
    - Know IAM Best Practices
  - Know AWS Inspector
  - Know AWS Application Discovery Service
- Storage
  - Exam does not cover Storage services in deep
  - Focus on Simple Secure Service (S3)
    - Understand S3 Permissions (Hint – acl authenticated users provides access to all authenticated users. How to control access)
    - Know S3 disaster recovery across region. (hint : cross region replication)
    - Know CloudFront for caching to improve performance
  - Elastic Block Store
    - Focus mainly on EBS Backup using snapshots for HA and Disaster recovery
- Database
  - Exam covers Database mainly in terms of HA and Disaster Recovery.
  - Know Aurora DR & HA using Read Replicas and Global Database
  - Elastic Search did appear in the exam, but it was only where search was relevant.
  - DynamoDB
    - Improve performance – Best practices (hint : one question for selection of keys)
    - DynamoDB Auto Scaling & DAX for caching
- Compute
  - Know EC2
    - Understand ENI for HA, user data, pre-baked AMIs for faster instance start times
    - Amazon Linux 2 Image (hint : it allows for replication of Amazon Linux behavior in on-premises)
    - Snapshot and sharing
  - Auto Scaling
    - Auto Scaling Lifecycle events
    - Blue/green deployments with Auto Scaling – With new launch configurations, new auto scaling groups or CloudFormation update policies.
  - Understand Lambda
    - Know Lambda Alias supports Canary deployments using Routing Config
  - ECS
    - Know Monitoring and deployments with image update
- Integration Tools
  - Know how CloudWatch integration with SNS and Lambda can help in notification (Topics are not required to be in detail)

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C01) Exam Resources

Online Courses
- Stephane Maarek – AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional 2019 [Highest Rated]
- Coursera – DevOps on AWS Specialization
- Linux Academy – AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional – It surely does not cover all the topics, so be sure you cover the AWS documentation for the topics mentioned above
- Zeal Vora – AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional 2020
Practice tests
- Braincert AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Practice Exams [Recommended]
- Stephane Maarek – AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Tests

AWS Certified DevOps – Professional Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified DevOps – Professional exam basically validates the following

Implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS
Understand, implement, and automate security controls, governance processes, and compliance validation
Define and deploy monitoring, metrics, and logging systems on AWS
Implement systems that are highly available, scalable, and self-healing on the AWS platform
Design, manage, and maintain tools to automate operational processes

Refer to the AWS Certified DevOps – Professional Exam Blue Print

AWS Certified DevOps - Professional Exam Breakup

AWS Cloud Computing Whitepapers

AWS Certified DevOps – Professional Exam Contents

Domain 1: Continuous Delivery and Process Automation

1.1 Demonstrate an understanding of application lifecycle management:
- Application deployment management strategies such as rolling deployments and A/B.
  - includes Blue Green Deployment using various services
  - includes deployment using Auto Scaling + ELB either as
    - separate ELB and Auto Scaling group
    - same ELB and Auto Scaling group with different launch config
  - includes Elastic Beanstalk deployment types which include rolling, rolling batch and blue green using swap urls
  - includes CloudFormation deployments using AutoScalingRollingUpdate & AutoScalingReplacementUpdate
  - includes OpsWorks Deployment Strategies with features to rollback
  - includes AutoScaling lifecycle and using hooks
  - includes AutoScaling Termination policies
  - includes Route 53 routing policies esp. health checks with failover and weighted routing
- Version control, testing, build tools and bootstrapping.
  - includes CloudFormation Best Practices esp. Nested Templates for better control, using parameters for reusability
  - includes bootstrapping using userdata
  - includes CloudFormation helper scripts, WaitCondition and Creation Policy
  - includes CloudFormation Custom Resource
  - Using Pre-Baked AMIs
  - Using Docker with Elastic Beanstalk
1.2 Demonstrate an understanding of infrastructure configuration and automation.
- includes Deployment tools comparison
- includes CloudFormation configuration, helper scripts and bootstrapping
- includes OpsWorks
- includes Elastic Beanstalk configurations using .ebextensions
1.3 Implement and manage continuous delivery processes using AWS services.
- includes CodeDeploy, OpsWorks
1.4 Develop and manage scripts and tools to automate operational tasks using the AWS SDKs, CLI, and APIs.
- includes using CloudFormation helper scripts
- includes using Elastic Beanstalk container commands

Domain 2: Monitoring, Metrics, and Logging

2.1 Monitor availability and performance.
- includes CloudWatch alarms and metrics
2.2 Monitor and manage billing and cost optimization processes.
- includes Consolidate Billing, Billing and Cost management
2.3 Aggregate and analyze infrastructure, OS and application log files.
- includes using CloudWatch logs
- includes using ELB access logs, CloudTrail logs which can be integrated with CloudWatch logs
2.4 Use metrics to drive the scalability and health of infrastructure and applications.
- includes using CloudWatch alarms, SNS and AutoScaling
2.5 Analyze data collected from monitoring systems to discern utilization patterns.
- includes CloudWatch and analysis using CloudWatch metrics
- includes using Kinesis for real time log analysis
2.6 Manage the lifecycle of application and infrastructure logs
- includes logs storage using CloudWatch, S3, Glacier and lifecycle policies
2.7 Leverage the AWS SDKs, CLIs and APIs for metrics and logging.
- includes CloudWatch logs using CloudWatch agent with logs group, events and metrics

Domain 3: Security, Governance, and Validation

3.1 Implement and manage Identity and Access Management and security controls.
- includes IAM, IAM Best Practices
- includes IAM Role – Identity Federation
3.2 Implement and manage protection for data in-flight and at rest.
- includes Encryption at Rest options
- includes S3 encryption, EBS encryption
- includes data in flight encryption using ELB HTTPs and TCP listeners
- includes management of certs and credentials
3.3 Implement, automate and validate cost controls for AWS resources.
- includes Cost Explorer, CloudWatch Billing alarms
3.4 Implement and manage automated network security and auditing.
- includes CloudTrail
- includes VPC security using Security Groups & NACLs
3.5 Apply the appropriate AWS account and billing set-up options based on business requirements.
- includes AWS Organizations, Consolidated Billing
3.6 Implement and manage AWS resource auditing and validation.
- includes CloudTrail, AWS Config
3.7 Use AWS services to implement IT governance policies.
- includes Risk and Compliance

Domain 4: High Availability and Elasticity

4.1 Determine appropriate use of multi-Availability Zone versus multi-region architectures.
- includes services boundaries
4.2 Implement self-healing application architectures.
- includes ELB, Auto Scaling,
- includes ELB with Auto Scaling with health checks, connection draining
- includes RDS Multi-AZ
4.3 Implement the most appropriate front-end scaling architecture.
- includes building scalable architecture using ELB with Auto Scaling
- includes using CloudFront covering cache behavior, dynamic content, work with on premise servers as origin, HLS with Elastic Transcoder
4.4 Implement the most appropriate middle-tier scaling architecture.
- includes building scalable architecture using ELB with Auto Scaling
- includes building loosely coupled scalable architecture using SQS, CloudWatch and AutoScaling and SWF
4.5 Implement the most appropriate data storage scaling architecture.
- includes various storage options DynamoDB, RDS, RDS with Read Replicas, ElastiCache, S3 and Glacier, EBS
- includes Storage Options patterns and anti-patterns
4.6 Demonstrate an understanding of when to appropriately apply vertical and horizontal scaling concepts.
- includes basic understanding of horizontal scaling is scale in/out and vertical scaling is scale up/down

AWS Certified DevOps – Professional Exam Resources

Online Courses
- acloud.guru Certified DevOps – Professional course
- Linux Academy Course – Devops Professional
Practice Exams
- Braincert AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional Practice Exam – Set of extensive questions, with very nice, accurate & detailed explanation