AWS Re:certification - DevOps Pro + Advanced Networking

After three years (actually, four in the case of Advanced Networking because I took the beta exam and they took forever to finalise the results) I had to take a couple of exams to prove I still know about Cloud things. I thought it might be useful to others if I write about my experiences.

One major change since I took AWS exams previously is that now you can do them under 'remote proctoring' in the comfort of your own home. As I'd previously done all my exams at AWS re:invent, jet-lagged and possibly slightly hungover, I thought this would be a lot easier. Fortunately exam providers Pearson Vue had me covered - they were only able to offer me exams at 6:45am and then 8:15pm. In fairness to Pearson, I probably could have got better timeslots if I hadn't been scheduling the exams the night before because I only just realised they were about to expire. I booked the DevOps Professional exam in the 6:45am slot and Advanced Networking in the 8:15pm slot, thinking that the networking exam would be the harder of the two and it'd give me some time to read up on things.

AWS DevOps Professional

From what I remember last time, there was previously quite a big emphasis on setting up autoscaling, using CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk and Opsworks. I've actually only used Elastic Beanstalk once, and I've never used Opswork at all, but previously having read the FAQs for both was sufficient.

This time I was again presented with a number of Elastic Beanstalk questions, this time somewhat more in depth than I remember. There were a couple of Opsworks questions too, but much of the exam focussed on CodeDeploy, CodePipeline and CodeBuild. This is handy, because I've used all three quite a bit, and it enabled me to make up marks I may have dropped not knowing the finer details of .ebextension files.

All in the exam took me 1 hour 45 to complete. Scores are no longer given immediately after the exam, but you do at least get a confirmation that you have passed straight away. Last time the exam took me 65 minutes - I'm not sure if I'm just getting slower in my old age or the questions are longer / tougher now.

AWS Advanced Networking Specialty

Firstly, I'm going to address the elephant in the room - no, I don't think specialty is a real word either.

I remember this exam being extremely draining last time, a combination of jet lag and the fact I had to answer 180 questions because it was a beta. I also recall many of the questions leaving me feeling that they were missing a vital piece of information needed to choose the right answer.

This time the exam was a massive improvement, and not just because I only had to answer 65 questions. I felt the questions clearly contained everything necessary to confidently choose the right answer. Sometimes you had to read the questions very carefully, but the information was always there. This being my second exam of the day I was pretty relieved that this was the case, and I passed it after 70 minutes or so. On the way I had to answer many questions about Direct Connect, VPNs, Security Groups and NACLs, but sadly not Transit Gateway which is what I'd spent my additional time reading up on. I particularly liked the questions which told you how something had been set up, specified something that wasn't working, and asked you why - these feel a lot closer to real life than the more 'solutiony' ones that are thankfully less common now.

Hopefully you found all this useful. If you're going to be taking any of these exams soon, I wish you the best of luck, and strongly suggest you look up what directives go into an ebextensions file.