I just qualified as an AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional. With thanks to AWS Technical Trainer, Mahmoud ElZayet.

The exam was similar in length to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam. I had only 5 minutes to spare at the end after answering and reviewing all the questions.

I found most of the questions relatively easy to answer but I have been working with AWS solutions for 3-4 years now. My passing score was 83% and I did change the answer to 8 questions on review, because there are a lot of answers that seems correct on first read but have a little piece of information in them that rules them out in the detailed knowledge of specific AWS services.

I found this resource to be a very accurate source of information on what items feature in the exam. Which in essence is a lot of detail on but not over complicated concepts around;
– Logging & Monitoring :: CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Kinesis… metrics and response to metrics
– Green/Blue and A/B deployments :: AutoScaling, Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks
– Securing access and resources :: IAM (including cross-account access), SSH to instances and access keys.
– Cloudformation :: especially around custom resources and Wait conditions.

Hands on experience is critical for this exam as many of the questions around possible solutions have intuitive answers if you have been working with AWS for some time.