How I prepared for AWS DevOps (DOP-C02) Professional exam
To give some background, I have been a software engineer with experience since 2017. Even though I worked as a software engineer, I worked half of my time handling EC2 servers, containers on ECS, etc. Having already earned three AWS certifications (Developer Associate, Solutions Architect Associate, and Cloud Practitioner) and the Kubernetes CKAD certification, I decided to pursue the AWS DevOps Professional certification to further advance my career. And here I wanted to share my DevOps Certification journey.
I enrolled in Stephane Maarek’s Udemy course. Completed it within 2 weeks with daily study. I previously took Stephane’s SAA course so it helped me to progress faster. I took detailed notes while taking the course.
For the practice purchased exams from Tutorials Dojo and Stephane’s question sets. While working with sets, I saw some deprecated services such as OpsWorks, CodeCommit, etc. still in the questions, so I suggest you check deprecated services from the AWS documentation. Also, I realized some EKS topics were not covered with Stephane’s course, especially Pod Identity and IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA). Basically, below is the strategy I followed
- Tackled 25 questions per session
- Reviewed incorrect answers immediately
- Note unfamiliar service features from the options
- After finishing each set, review the above noted features from the AWS Documentation and do small experiments on the AWS console
- After finishing 3 sets, I sit with 75 questions in one sit and check how I can solve the previous 3 sets
After tackling about 200 questions, I scheduled my exam. My exam is scheduled at 13:30 and I checked in from 13:00. The check-in process was pretty quick. Proctor tried to connect with voice connection with my MacBook, but I could not hear the proctor’s voice, so we decided to communicate with chat instead. Finished exam around 16:40, total spending 3:40 minutes, and it was the longest exam I've ever had.
Surprisingly, I received my exam result around 21:00 after 4 hours. I first received the Credly badge email, then got an email from AWS telling me congrats! That was a belief I did not want to sit that long exam again! The previous 2 certifications, AWS Developer — Associate and AWS Cloud Practitioner, are extended by 3 years automatically. And AWS Solution Architect did not extend.
This is the experience I had, as a summary, it was a pretty hard exam to prepare. I spent my weeks reading paragraphs of questions, options, it required pretty consistency and energy, I am pretty happy to pass!
In my next post, I am going to put my real raw notes I took while studying for this exam. Hopefully it helps whoever is preparing for the exam. And stay focused!
