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Thinking of taking the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Beta exam? Fear not, these top tips will help ensure you are best prepared for the big day!

I have never been great as exams. However, as a Cloud Engineer with years of experience working with different clients, I now feel confident I have seen, first-hand, all the weird and wonderful scenarios that pop up in AWS exams at one point or another! So when I saw the AWS DevOps 2018 Beta on offer I thought “…why not?”

But how do you study for a Beta Exam? Especially for a Cloud Platform that updates and releases features as frequently as AWS?

The bleeding edge of the exam is what I was interested in the most! In previous exams, I have found myself selecting the wrong answer and dismissing the correct answer after being thrown off by the older terminology used within the question. However, this Beta exam promised brand new, up-to-date material and more recent services. So I wouldn’t have to worry about that!

Training Resources

The following training resources and platforms really helped as I prepared for the exam:

  • A Cloud Guru:
    • The Old DevOps Course – Great to get an idea of what AWS were going to be looking for in the exam.
    • Fantastic library of resources.
  • Udemy:
    • Many great courses across the titles of CI/CD, AWS Developer as well as SysOps all recommending great material to go on to explore.
    • However, a lot the course material is rather basic and if you have watched other 101s you may not find the content so useful.
  • White Papers – You can’t be expected to pass the exam if you don’t know the services that you are using. Reading how AWS believes that you should operate and act with their service will ensure that you have the most successful results and will help you understand the concepts that are taught from courses relating to this Exam’s subject. Check out the white papers here.
  • FAQs for CICD Services as well as Storage Solutions – The FAQs for AWS hold a gold mine of information in my opinion. They are generally created because customers constantly ask these questions to AWS and they will be testing to ensure that you know the answer to these common requests. I recommend doing this to any consultant across the whole spectrum to keep up to date with the services. (Example: Amazon RDS FAQs)
  • YouTube – Re:Invent – Older Re:Invent Videos are amazing, like the billion packets series which give the viewer an understanding of what happens under the hood of the infrastructure which allows you to better architect for the AWS platform to ingrain your solution with the mechanics of the platform
Exam Commonalities
  • A lot of the questions I was given appeared to be based around the following
    • Minimising/Simplification of Code
    • AutoScaling Mechanics of All Services
    • CICD Tooling within the AWS EcoSystem like CodeDeploy and Pipeline
    • OpsWorks featured pretty highly in this version
    • The Event System Bus
    • Knowledge of API Calls
  • A knowledge of these subjects will greatly aid your chances of getting a Passing Grade!

General Tips

  • Take your time to read the question and the answer carefully. There were mistakes in Answers that could automatically exclude it as an answer.
  • Pick a decent pace so you finish with a decent time, remember to use the flagging option and come back to more difficult questions.
  • Go through ALL the questions at the end, some questions have statements that can help you exclude wrong answers.
  • Get plenty of rest the night before! – This Engineer did not.

Check out some more of our certification and exam guides here:

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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam: resources and tips

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