I have successfully completed my AWS DevOps Engineer - Professional Certification and thought of sharing my experience hoping that it will benefit aspiring candidates. Additionally, I had completed AWS Solution Architect - Professional Certification last year, and here I will be providing brief comparison. If you are debating between these two certifications, then you may find it helpful.
Certification experience when compared with SA professional - It is quite subjective and differences are likely to vary for each candidate. Still, here is my take:
- Sequencing - First of all, I completed all associate level certification, which I'll strongly recommend, even if it's not mandatory from AWS. Coming to professional certifications, I felt taking SA professional certification before DevOps professional helped me a lot. There were few questions where knowledge gained from SA professional preparation came handy in elimination process. So, if you have flexibility in choosing, then you may consider the sequence.
- Difficulty Level - Even though my score was marginally better in SA professional certification, I feel that difficulty level is relatively higher than DevOps professional. At the same time, I should acknowledge that reversing sequence may change this conclusion. Additionally, I felt that SA professional certification had lot more question that required reasoning to come up with right answer(s). Whereas, for DevOps professional, I had to rely more on memory and there were many occasions where I found myself scratching my head to remember something that I read/seen in training.
- Time Management - Average verbosity of questions and answers is less for DevOps professional, as compared to SA professional, which makes time management relatively easier. In SA professional certification, I literally ran out of time and couldn't even complete review of questions that I had marked for review. For DevOps professional exam, I completed review of marked questions and still had few minutes to review more questions! However, it is still a extremely challenging exam and good time management is crucial!
Preparation Resources - Now that we are done with comparison, let me provide the resources that I went through during my preparation:
- Online Trainings - I completed Stéphane Maarek's course available on Udemy - AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional 2022 - Hands On!. This is not the only course available, however this is what our Cognizant's Academy team recommended and provided us free access. While this course is really good, I think this could be substituted with other course(s), if situation demands that. You should also consider free course from AWS Skill Builder - Exam Readiness: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, which provides good overview and some tips on how to read exam questions and eliminate wrong answers.
- Hand-on Practice - Our Cognizant Academy provided a curated list of labs that we should complete as part of preparation. While, I can't share that list here, I'd strongly recommend to get as much hands-on as possible.
- AWS White Papers - White papers help in providing big picture, best practices and patterns, and solidify conceptual understanding. I went through all white papers listed on - AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional page and then some. I'd strongly recommend reading at least these white papers.
- Practice Tests - I completed practice tests from Stéphane Maarek and Abhishek Singh - Practice Exam | AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional, and from Jon Bonso - AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Exams. It is important to take these tests like real test, so that you can get used to physically sitting for required duration while remaining focused! Additionally, at the end of every test, do a thorough review of all answers (incorrect or correct) with provided reasoning. Identify gaps in understanding, and go through provided references to address the gaps.
- Online Documentation / Articles / Blogs / FAQs - AWS has really wide and deep documentation available and it's easy to get lost. So, I tried to refer to specific documentation as needed - either when provided in online training or when reviewing practice test answers.
I also maintained notes while going through preparatory material. This helped in clearing my thoughts, and later on when I'm trying to do last minute revision just before exam, they became very handy. If you search, you'll be able to find multiple resources with notes from other candidates who have cleared the exam. However, for me, these were not as useful as my personal notes (even if they were not as exhaustive). After scheduling my exam, I went through Stéphane Maarek's online course one more time, this time at higher speed.
For brevity, I'm have not included certification course content and online exam proctoring process/experience. Plz feel free to reach out to me, in case you need any additional details in this regard and I'll do my best to help you.
In the end, I'd like to thank Cognizant Academy for continuously pushing me with their follow-ups/reminders to appear for certification exam. Without them, I might have pushed out this exam even further. I'd also like to thank
Stéphane Maarek
,
Abhishek Singh
, and
Jon Bonso
for providing high quality training material!
Congratulations Pawan !!
Congratulations 🎉