AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Exam Prep

The DevOps Engineer Professional exam tests your ability to implement and manage CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and automated operational processes on AWS. SDLC automation (22%) is the largest domain, covering CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodeCommit — you'll need to understand deployment strategies (rolling, blue/green, canary) and how to implement automated testing in pipelines.

The IaC domain (17%) tests CloudFormation (custom resources, drift detection, nested stacks, StackSets) and CDK. Monitoring questions cover CloudWatch (custom metrics, alarms, dashboards), X-Ray for distributed tracing, and centralized logging architectures. Security questions involve IAM policies, secrets management with Secrets Manager and Parameter Store, and automated compliance with Config rules.

This exam assumes hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation. Start with the deployment services (CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy) and practice designing multi-stage pipelines with manual approval gates, cross-account deployments, and rollback strategies. Understand the differences between in-place and blue/green deployments across EC2, ECS, and Lambda.

CloudFormation is heavily tested — know how to write templates with conditions, mappings, outputs, and exports. Understand drift detection, change sets, and how to use StackSets for multi-account deployments. For monitoring, focus on CloudWatch Logs agent configuration, metric filters, and composite alarms. Budget 6-8 weeks of study time with 2+ years of DevOps experience.

The DevOps Engineer Professional is one of only two professional-level AWS certifications, making it a powerful career differentiator. Certified DevOps professionals command salaries ranging from $145,000 to $190,000. The certification is particularly valued by organizations implementing DevOps transformations and building platform engineering teams.

This certification validates skills that are in high demand: CI/CD automation, infrastructure as code, observability, and security automation. It pairs naturally with the Solutions Architect Professional for those who want to demonstrate both architectural and operational expertise. Many organizations require at least one team member with this certification for AWS partnership requirements.