AWS developers should study for the AWS DevOps Certification exam even if they don't intend to take the test. Read on to learn why - and what to study.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a post for our blog, but it’s definitely a great time to come back to it! Our content team just released a new learning path at Cloud Academy to study and prepare for the AWS DevOps Professional Certification.
With this last learning path, Cloud Academy offers Learning Paths that help you prepare for all 5 AWS Certifications.
This article is divided into 3 different paragraphs:
This learning path is particularly long and articulated. It includes 13 hours of video courses, 4 advanced hands-on-labs, and a set of questions (with explanations) to verify your knowledge and prove your confidence for passing the exam. At the end of the learning path, you can download a certificate from Cloud Academy certifying your completion of the path and that you are ready to sit for the exam in one of the AWS centers.
Scroll to the end of this article to see all the details about the video lectures, labs, and the 102 questions with explanations included.
If you want to learn more about the exam and how to prepare for it, Andrew wrote a great article a few weeks ago: Pass the AWS DevOps Professional exam.
That’s a great question for a lot of professionals who have been studying to achieve some of the most popular AWS Certifications like AWS Solutions Architect Associate and Professional or the AWS Certified Developer and SysOps Administrator.
We are talking about AWS DevOps training because AWS recently introduced some powerful new tools. These tools are part of the growing complexity and automation Amazon is building inside its platform.
While other certifications focus mostly on your knowledge of specific services, the AWS DevOps path wants candidates with a deep understanding of architecture design inside Amazon. They want DevOps people who fully understand Automation, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and data management.
You must be able to talk deeply about the “why” of your design decisions around your infrastructure — that’s why we spend a few lectures in our path focusing on theory. You will particularly appreciate our lecture “Understand Risk” that explains how you should consider redundancy working with AWS, and how you should understand risk in a complex scenario where your entire business is running in AWS. Because there are several components that can fail, architecting and design to avoid failure is a complex scenario where you need to understand all the elements.
When design and theory behind the best choices are a priority, the real DevOps part of AWS comes supports development with a mix of tools that today define automation and deployment for Amazon Web Services: AWS CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, CodeCommit and of course AWS CloudFormation, Amazon ECS, Amazon Elastic BeanStalk and OpsWorks.
AWS built a complete suite of tools that allows engineers to approach DevOps using a combination of services. This is one area where Cloud Academy adds value by helping with the DevOps path. Amazon is moving towards a managed solution for engineers, where the tools will help automating 99% of your infrastructure. Unlike other platforms, becoming a DevOps engineer with AWS requires 100% knowledge of the entire suite of services. You must understand exactly the best ways of using all the tools for automating and monitoring your infrastructure and defining processes (technical and business) for your team. In this sense, AWS DevOps training is about knowing the fundamentals every DevOps engineer should have, and applying them to a specific set of services and scenarios that belong to AWS.
DevOps training for AWS is becoming a very interesting role/discipline as the company continues launching services. It’s true that most services will be managed by AWS (think of something like ECS), but it’s also true that the complexity of the AWS DevOps Engineer will be increasingly focused on design and understanding of the complex systems.
While writing this post, I found myself reading a recent article on why DevOps is dead (the author argues that most platforms, including AWS, are offering a managed approach to their services), and I had to laugh considering how complex these scenarios have become.
I believe it is more critical than ever to work with a DevOps engineer that understands these complex scenarios and can plan for them. Consider that – even today – a big percentage of enterprise companies don’t run entirely on AWS. Coordinating these services with external platforms and environments makes this role even more indispensable.
While I was watching our lectures, I had to re-watch some concepts a few times to make sure I understood them perfectly. That’s the kind of experience you should expect when you start studying for this certification. AWS DevOps training is challenging because the role is has evolved into one of most critical positions in any growing AWS cloud deployment.
That’s what you are thinking reading this article, isn’t it? Great question! This is probably the most difficult certification for AWS — together with AWS Solutions Architect Professional. The reason our learning path includes 4 Labs is because this certification requires a lot of real-world experiences on Amazon Web Services, with real scenarios. In this path’s first lecture, we offer more information about the specific audience and targets for this certification.
The AWS DevOps Professional Certification is designed for experienced engineers that are interested in having a full understanding of automation and operations inside Amazon. It is for those people who want to understand everything from architecture design to data processes design and metrics. It’s a very complete curriculum, and one that will definitely help you emerge in the job market with substantial professional skills and greater opportunity. If you are a DevOps engineer coming from other platforms and using different tools you may really wonder how Amazon engineered a lot of these “typical” scenarios.
You should consider this certification once you have achieved all the others because achieving it shows dedication and deep skills. If you want to have a complete set of skills for AWS, I strongly believe you should go through this learning path — even if you are not considering this certification immediately. The reason is simple: the lectures help you understand how complex AWS has become. Putting the best services into the optimum configuration is almost impossible without a really strong overview, and our learning path offers that.
I also really like the fact that Andrew focuses on the business side. He Illustrates why lacking this knowledge in your team is a big risk for your business and for your company. For a CTO or VP of Infrastructure, this set of courses is a great way of understanding who you should hire and what skills you should look for! (we have been there!)
Maybe you will not go for the certification immediately, but if you want to learn more about AWS and why it is such a big, successful platform. Studying for this DevOps training path will help you, even if you are still working on other certifications.
At Cloud Academy, we believe everyone learns differently. Our learning paths are the most concrete example of this belief because they include three key features:
The AWS DevOps Professional learning path includes:
Below is the entire set of lectures, labs, and a set of 102 questions with explanations
You can find all of them ordered by importance. Let me show you an example with a few screenshots:
In this case, for example, at step 5 of our path, you will learn about advanced use of AWS CloudFormation, and after that, you should be able to complete a practical lab inside our platform.
While you have a set of questions inside this learning path, I suggest that you also use our general Quizzes inside Cloud Academy. You can select our Test mode or Study mode for specific AWS topics or categories. See the example below that I took from our DevOps learning path:
If you have followed me this far, you are interested. Start our AWS DevOps Professional and see for yourself! We offer a free 7-day trial subscription so there is nothing holding you back. Let us know what you think about it and how we can keep improving it – we will update the material, at least, every quarter.
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