AWS DevOps Pro exam recertification

I last sat the DevOps Professional exam in April 2017, when it initially was valid for 2 years. 2 years was extended to 3, and then Covid-19's closure of test centres meant an additional 6 months was added, but I needed to take the exam again to keep my certification current.

I've been working as a Cloud Engineer for the last three years (with varying different titles), but this is a long time in cloud computing, and the number of services AWS now offers is rather mind-boggling, so I knew I wanted to prepare in a more formal way for the exam. As a broad overview I watched Stephane Maarek's course AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional 2020 - Hands On! . This was excellent, and helped narrow down my focus to "just" 40 or so services.

My remote proctoring experiences with Pearson were varied - I had "technical problems" on two separate occasions - one which was poorly dealt with, and one with stellar customer service, but I ended up taking it early on Saturday morning. Honestly, after 6 months of the children at home, the hardest part of a remotely-administered exam is finding a room without clutter!

I can't go into the specifics of the exam, except to say that this is still a hard exam, on a par with the Solutions Architect Pro. I feel that there was a lot of Solutions Architecture in this exam - it's not just "implement this design", but "what should we build?". Also, most of the options would work, so look out for which is the cheapest, easiest to implement, or introduces the least latency - i.e. you have to know your services well.

It was a multi-choice exam (usually choose a single answer from 4 options, or two or three from 5 or 6 options), with 75 questions to answer in 190 minutes. The scenarios were long (2-3 paragraphs), and I was pleased to see that even using the Pearson OnVue software, Ctrl and the Plus key increased the font size, so that was helpful on a smaller laptop screen (I'm used to working with an external monitor and keyboard, but the remote testing experience likes you to use a single laptop with no peripherals).

Corey Quinn in Last Week in AWS often makes a point of mocking some of the names in AWS, and after reading 60 questions, with at least four options, I was often left wondering whether some were made up, or plausible names for AWS services I hadn't yet used, for instance, QuickSight and AWS Health.

Choosing between CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline is hard! In a recent tweet, Corey nailed the difference between Azure DevOps and AWS's Code* offerings:

Azure: "You write code in Code that lives in GitHub and deploys with Actions seamlessly to Azure. See, notice how easy it is?"

AWS: "We offer seven services starting with 'Code', an IDE that isn't one of them, and a bunch of prescriptive blueprints for how to do it all."

Thankfully, I passed the exam (it would have been a little professionally embarrassing to have failed it, but that was certainly an option, as it's hard to know the properties of so many different services). I knew that the DevOps Engineer Pro qualification would renew the related associate exams (SysOps Administrator, and Developer), but I was nicely surprised, that Cloud Practitioner was also extended, so now I have four to renew in September 2023.

If you're sitting it soon, good luck!