A growing number of enterprises are adopting cloud computing, which necessitates a growing requirement to build, deploy and maintain secure workloads within it. The introductory edition is the basic course “Cloud Practitioner”. It requires basic knowledge of AWS and is recommended not only for engineers but also for sales people. While the range of questions is wide, from the concept of “what is the cloud?” To security and billing, the functions that are often used in practice and the recommended usage are being asked.
AWS offers webinars for certification exams, as well as free digital training. There are other places that offer paid e-learning, and of course there is also a way to study with books. It seems good to find a study method that suits you.
Today we will talk about certification from the AWS security certification, namely preparation for the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam. I know that it is not technically but I am convinced that they will be interested in this topic. Let’s get started!
Is it worth getting certified?
At the beginning, I will try to answer an important question, i.e. whether it makes sense to approach any AWS cloud certification at all. I just want to make you aware that it really depends on a few things, mainly about you and your life and professional situation. Let me explain.
The advantages of certification
By studying for a given exam, you organize your knowledge of the services you already know and complete your knowledge of the services with which you have worked little or no work. The scope of the exam, in a way, audits our level of knowledge and often forces us to fill in gaps that we might not even be aware of,
The certificate may draw the attention of recruiters or help us break through the first stage of recruitment. No matter which type of AWS certification you want to pursue, the best way to prepare for AWS certification is to take it seriously.
Getting a certificate can be a good argument when talking about your future raise,
A certificate can often help at interviews, you should not expect that having one will open every door for us, but we can often skip basic questions at such meetings and move on to more complicated ones, where we have to defend ourselves anyway,
It shows our current or future employer that we constantly update our knowledge and skills, that we can motivate ourselves to work, and most importantly, that we do not need to be persuaded to do such things (in some companies, X employees are required to have current certificates – usually this takes place in consulting companies marked as a partner of a given supplier).
What is this certificate?
In this post, I focus on describing the preparation for the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional AKA DOP-C01 exam, the exam is a natural, next step for people who have already obtained the AWS SysOps Administrator – Associate or AWS Developer – Associate certificate, until the end of 2018 it was even the requirement – fortunately, it has already been abolished and from the beginning of 2019 you can take exams at the “Professional” level without having to pass the “Associate” exams. AWS has several other certification paths, so it is worth reading the graphic below and the information on the official AWS Certification website (click).
The scope of material
The exam checks knowledge from six different domains, the questions mainly (but not only) related to the services listed below:
- SDLC Automation – SDLC, or Software Development Lifecycle, is everything related to the CI / CD process, deployment types (Blue / Green, Canary, etc.) and AWS services that can help in this, e.g. AWS CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeBuild.
- Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code – Cloudformation, AWS Lambda, StepFunctions, OpsWorks and Elastic Beanstalk
- Monitoring and Logging – AWS CloudWatch vs AWS CloudTrail vs AWS Config + all services and methods that give you the ability to log events and monitor resources,
- Policies and Standards Automation – AWS Config, AWS Trusted Advisor, Personal Health Dashboard (yes! There is such an option in the menu!), AWS Systems Manager and everything related to it,
- Incident and Event Response – CloudWatch Events, AWS SNS + triggers in individual services that facilitate process automation,
- High Availability, Fault Tolerance, and Disaster Recovery – Multi-AZ vs Multi-Region architecture, everything related to resource scaling, Disaster Recovery, RTO / RPO, cost optimization, EC2 AutoScaling Groups.
Certainly, the advantage of AWS is that it tends to be elusive. Obtaining this qualification proves that you have security knowledge about AWS
- Knowledge of professional data classification and how AWS data protection works.
- Knowledge of data encryption techniques and how AWS works to achieve them.
- Knowledge of the secure Internet Protocol and how AWS works to make it happen .
- Practical knowledge of the capabilities of AWS security services and services that enable a secure production environment.
- Competencies gained through more than two years of production experience using AWS security services and features.
- The ability to make decisions that balance cost, security, and deployment complexity according to a set of application requirements.
Knowledge of security operations and risks.