How I passed the Professional AWS DevOps Certification amid the Coronavirus Lockdown Sat G Follow Apr 14 · 9 min read

The global Coronavirus crisis has altered everyone’s lives in a way that I’ve never seen. I had been planning to renew the AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Certification when the Coronvirus reached the country. Schools closed and I was told to work from home. The country came to a standstill. I could have easily postponed the studying and the exam until life resumed some form of normality. However, I decided to proceed.

Why did I take this certification?

I had passed it 3 years ago and was thinking about not renewing it. The AWS Professional certifications are advanced and they take up a lot of time, effort and mental energy. It came down to 3 main reasons as to why I went ahead:

The certification is well regarded and is considered to be on the top tier when it comes to cloud-specific DevOps certifications

As I already held the certification, I felt that it would have been a waste of my previous certification and learning.

I did not want to use the crisis as an excuse for not doing anything

Did I need any prerequisites?

The short answer is no.

Previously AWS used to insist that you held either the AWS Certified Developer — Associate or the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator — Associate prior to taking the exam. AWS recently removed these restrictions to increase flexibility in their certification program.

Despite this, I would not have even looked at the AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Certification if I didn’t hold one or both of these associate certifications. The associate certifications lay a solid foundation onto the route of becoming certified at the professional level. I would consider jumping straight into the AWS professional certification without holding one of them, absurd.

If you hold a related associate certification and pass a professional exam, you get the benefit of your associate certifications automatically renewing. You will therefore continue to hold the associate certification without ever having to sit the associate exam again providing you renew and pass your professional certification.

Experience should be a personal prerequisite. I have many years in development and DevOps. The exam covers real-world scenarios and I found that I would be able to apply my experience to the certification content.

Where did I begin?

Preparing for the AWS DevOps 3 years ago was completely different from the preparation that I was going to do this time around. The Coronavirus Lockdown had completely changed my learning strategy but also the certification content was hugely different. I decided not to “upgrade” my knowledge by only filling in the gaps. I went back to square one and approached the certification as though I had no prior knowledge of the content.

I started by heading over to the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional homepage and checking out the certification content. I downloaded both the exam guide and the sample questions and reviewed them.

I looked at each of the test domains and the weights associated with each of them. I was sure to keep them in the back of my mind when studying for the exam.

Content and weights

How did I learn?

Back when I passed 3 years ago, I started with A Cloud Guru. They were the only decent option around. Now there are many more options available. I had been grandfathered into A Cloud Guru as I was one of their first customers so I still had access to their DevOps course and decided to start here.

I was working full time and had planned on using their mobile application on my long commutes to watch the videos. I wasn’t going to take notes because I’m too lazy nor would I have been able to as I would have been stuck underneath someone’s armpit on packed trains.

I had not started the course when the global Coronavirus crisis had reached the UK. I was now going to be at home for the foreseeable future. I never thought I would miss the commuting time as a learning opportunity, but I did.

Being at home and having a young family, I don’t have the privilege of working to an uninterrupted schedule. I now had to balance work, family and worrying about the lack of toilet paper in supermarkets while preparing for the exam. I studied every late into every night and used any free time I could.

After completing the course I turned to the official AWS whitepapers. I read any AWS papers that were DevOps related. Once again, I’m too lazy to make notes so just read the whitepapers once or twice. Some of the papers I read were:

Whenever I came across a subject I was not too familiar with I opened up my AWS account and played around with the service until I was comfortable with what it was and what it could do. I found tutorials online related to the service and followed then step-by-step. Nothing helps you learn more than experience.

Practice, Practice, Practice

The most important part of my learning was to practice the exams.

I had previously taken an AWS exam and was entitled to take an official AWS practice exam for free. There are around 20 questions and it simulates the exam environment. Unfortunately, the only feedback you get is a pass or fail at the end of it. You are not informed of which questions you answered correctly or incorrectly and why. It was still worth doing to get a feel for the questions and the exam environment experience.

There are a number of companies offering example exam questions. I used the exams over at A Cloud Guru and Cloud Academy. The actual exam is 3 hours and has 75 multiple questions. I looked for any sample exams that had a range of questions and worked through them.

It was important to review the practice exams after completing them and understand why I got questions both correct and incorrect. I sat the practice exams a few times to ensure that I was getting a passing mark and understood the explanations. Once I was satisfied, I decided to book the exam.

Booking the exam

Having passed an AWS exam previously, I was eligible for a 50% discount voucher. The AWS DevOps Professional Engineer Certification is expensive at $300 + tax, so the 50% discount is a big saving.

I had only completed one proctored exam at home before and had hated it. There are distractions and you have to have an immaculate space when you sit your exam. Proctored exams tend to be strict about what you have in your surroundings. It’s much easier walking into and out of a test centre and not have to worry about these preparations.

With the Coronavirus pandemic, test centres were closed. AWS announced they were extending the renewal dates of certifications to support its professionals. I had 2 options: do the exam at home or wait until the crisis was over and go to a test centre. I had read many horror stories about people having to wait for hours to start their exams and the exam application crashing during the exam when taking it online.

Despite this, I booked the online, proctored exam anyway. I’m very impatient and wanted it over and done with. I didn’t want the exam hanging over my head for the next few weeks and months. Besides, with the current situation, there were important things to focus on.

On the day

I treated it like any other. The hard work was done. I tested my equipment as per instructions to ensure I had a working microphone, webcam and that my internet speed was adequate.

I had scheduled it for immediately after work. As soon as I finished my working day, I cleared out the room of my second screen, clutter and any paper lying around. I had my drivers licence as identification. You have to submit photos of your surrounding to ensure that there isn’t anything that you could unfairly use to your advantage.

It’s important to go to the toilet before the exam starts. Once you start the exam, you are not allowed to leave the room for any reason whatsoever.

I reminded my family that I had an important exam and not to be disturbed unless there was an emergency, not that they listened!

The exam

I started the exam. I got lucky. As soon as I logged in and showed my identification and the room I was taking the exam in I got started. I did not experience any long wait times or software crashes.

When you attend the exam at a centre, they usually provide you with a piece of paper and a pencil. With the AWS professional exams, there is always a lot to read. There are times that after I have read the questions and the multiple-choice questions I have forgotten the details. I like to make some notes which allows me to focus on what might be correct without having to go back to the incorrect answers. The exam software provides a whiteboard feature that replicates a physical piece of paper. I tried it out at the beginning of the exam but I felt it was too much hassle to open, make notes, and then close again. When opened, it would distractingly cover some of the screen. I decided to just use brainpower and make mental notes during the exam.

I made sure I read the question carefully. There are some important phrases to look out for such as “the quickest”, “the most automated” or “the most cost-effective”. These phrases guided me when there was more than one correct answer.

When I had passed the AWS Solutions Architect — Professional Certification recently I had made the mistake of reading some questions, not answering them and marking them for review with the approach of coming back to them at the end of the exam. This was the wrong strategy. As there is so much reading to do, I had wasted a lot of time reading the question once and then again when reviewing it. For the DevOps exam, I decided I was not going to take this approach. I refused to mark any question for review. My plan was to answer every question in order and not move on until the current question had been answered. There were times when I felt that I had taken too much time on a question but the approach definitely worked. I finished the exam 20 minutes early. When it ended, I was overjoyed when I saw the “PASS” notification.

Distractions. There were lots of them. I have taken for granted how quiet it is at test centres. At home, every noise is amplified. I have a packed household so the noise was creeping through the door and making its way directly to my ears. At one point my son was inexplicably barking like a dog right outside of the door for 5 minutes straight. I found myself losing focus with all of this sound. If I ever do another exam at home, I’ll invest in some earplugs.

Distractions

Areas to concentrate on

After the exam, I felt I had studied the correct areas. The one main area, above all, is CloudWatch, its monitoring and automation capabilities. If you have a deep understanding of this then you will do very well in the exam. A lot of the questions revolved around this service.

The most important areas to focus on are:

CloudTrail — its integration with services and CloudWatch

— its integration with services and CloudWatch Elastic Beanstalk — deployment strategies and coupling with RDS

— deployment strategies and coupling with RDS ECS — deployment and monitoring

— deployment and monitoring Config — recording resource changes and remediation

— recording resource changes and remediation CloudFormation — best practices

— best practices CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy and CodePipeline — how they all integrate and how they are monitored

— how they all integrate and how they are monitored Deployment strategies — blue/green, canary, in place, immutable etc

— blue/green, canary, in place, immutable etc Regional Failover — how workloads can be failed from not just an availability zone but a region (think read replicas)

— how workloads can be failed from not just an availability zone but a region (think read replicas) Lifecycle hooks — how they can be used for monitoring or initiating actions

— how they can be used for monitoring or initiating actions DynamoDB — index strategies and regional replication

— index strategies and regional replication SSM — the entire AWS System Manager suite of products

— the entire AWS System Manager suite of products Opsworks — the main features and adding new layers

Some other areas include S3, Lambda, Kinesis, Secrets Manager, Trust Advisor, and Inspector.

What now?

I received the pass confirmation email a few days later. I could start to focus on achieving another certification. It’s not impossible during the Coronavirus Lockdown but its not easy. I am fortunate enough to still be working full time. I have a full house during the lockdown. I could carve out time if it was a priority, but it’s not. There are more important things going on in the world and with my family for now. Maybe when we see the back of Coronavirus, I’ll consider it.