https://medium.com/@marijnscholtens/aws-certified-devops-engineer-professional-vs-aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional-008719bbe496
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional vs AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
Marijn Scholtens
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Having recently passed both of these certification exams, I’d like to share my experience that may also help you to prepare for these exams. As you probably understand already, these exams are far from easy. But there are certainly ways to pass them and this article should guide you to achieve the certifications. Let’s dive in!
Recapping the Certifications
At this moment, AWS offers 12 certifications about their Cloud platform. By studying for certifications, you will be able to learn about how the platform works, what services are offered, and how you can use them to build up a cloud infrastructure. At the moment of writing, AWS is about to release a new Associate certification for Data Engineering. In any case, there are four types of certifications: Foundational, Associate, Professional and Specialties. See the diagram below.
Logically, the Professional and Specialty certifications are much tougher than the Associate and Foundational ones, and thus carry higher value. Although I haven’t any attempted any Specialty myself yet, I have certainly experienced that the Professional exams are much tougher than the Associate ones.
It may seem to tempting to just take the Solutions Architect track and run from Associate and Professional, and that is also where I will give you a warning. My strong advice is as follows:
Before attempting any Professional or Specialty certifications, be sure to get ALL Associate certifications first!
The reason for this is that the Associate certifications cover a lot of material that you will be needing for the Professional certifications, and will improve your overall understanding and knowledge of the platform.
Preparation
Once you have passed all Associate certifications, you may want to think about doing the Professional certifications. Although these certifications are certainly attainable, these are not a walk in the park. Whereas with the Associate certifications it would have been sufficient to just take one course, this will likely not suffice for the Professional ones. Let us go over how I prepared.
Firstly, to give you an idea about myself, I graduated with a Master’s in Computer Science and I have been working in IT for around 5 years with mainly developer roles, and only a bit of DevOps and Cloud on the side. So in fact I don’t have that much practical experience with AWS, and this means that you probably don’t need it either. I have also taken a number of certifications at other cloud providers, but mainly the foundational or associate ones. So even if you are just a developer with several years of experience in IT, it is certainly possible to pass the certifications if you prepare well.
But as I said earlier, it is strongly recommended to get the Associate certifications first.
Certification Difficulties
Out of the two, I would argue that AWS Certified DevOps Engineering Professional (DOP) is slightly easier than AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (SAP). The reason for that is although both certifications go into both breadth and depth, it should be noted that DOP is somewhat narrower and goes deeper on certain topics that are less relevant than SAP. There is definitely a lot of overlap, but DOP will in particular focus on topics like CloudFormation, CodePipeline and Monitoring, which are less relevant for SAP. SAP however will focus more on topics like Migration, Networking, Security and Multi-Account Setups. Some topics will also be touched upon from a high level such as Machine Learning and IoT. Here it suffices to know just the basics.
Training
There are multiple ways to train for both of the exams. AWS recommends to have had two years of practical experience with the platform, but as I mentioned earlier, I had only little practical experience. Furthermore, even if you do have practical experience, it is unlikely that you will have completed a full-fledged migration yourself or set up a Direct Connection, and do lots of data processing in Redshift. However, it can be useful to have practical experience with managing EC2 instances in an Auto-Scaling Group behind an Elastic Load Balancer.
Also it is recommended to read lots of whitepapers and re:Invent videos. Admittedly, I didn’t do any of that. You could probably do it if you want, but it isn’t necessary to pass the exam. I strictly followed only two courses for each exam, did some practical exams, and only looked up a few topics by myself in the AWS documentation, using Google.
For DOP I took the course on ACloudGuru, which recently migrated its course to Pluralsight, and also comes with practice exams. I must say that the ACloudGuru courses don’t go into too much depth, and some instructors speak pretty slow (tip: Put the playback speed on 1.25 or 1.5). However, they do offer sandbox labs which you can use for practice without incurring additional costs. The Udemy course by Stephane Maarek covers much more content in around the same amount of time, but doesn’t offer free labs. You follow up on the hands-on lectures in your own AWS account if you like but I only just watched and took notes.
For SAP I took a similar setup by taking both the ACloudGuru course, migrated to Pluralsight as well, and taking the sister course on Udemy. Furthermore, I also bought the practice exam from Maarek on Udemy.
Overall, I would recommend to take two courses per exam, and take practice questions from two different vendors. You can of course do additional research yourself, but this way you should be sufficiently prepared. Although both courses will show overlap, this will only help you to understand and remember the topics better.
My Exam Experience
I decided to attempt the DOP exam a few months after I passed the SysOps Administrator Associate, which I passed on a second attempt. Having the content of that certification still somewhat fresh in mind, I took some time to prepare the exam by doing the courses and practising the exam. As mentioned earlier I didn’t have much practical experience but I wanted to try it anyway. You get 180 minutes to answer 75 questions, and I definitely needed all of that time, in order to eventually pass with a score of 795.
For the SAP exam, I applied for a time extension of 30 minutes, so I had 210 minutes in total to answer 75 questions. And I definitely needed those extra 30 minutes! The exam was definitely tougher than DOP because the questions were broader and also slightly deeper. Having thought that I probably failed this time, I obtained a result of 790.
Questions
It is important to understand that the exams do not just test your knowledge about the platform. They actually test a lot more, such as:
- Being able to apply knowledge, given a scenario
- Analytical and architectural thinking
- Cognitive stamina
- Making decisions under (huge) time pressure
By far most of the questions will be scenario-based, and multiple answers are likely to be valid solutions for the problem at hand. AWS will try to fool you into thinking that some solutions sound reasonable, although they actually have a limitation or a cool-sounding feature that doesn’t exist. Other solutions may be valid but are less efficient, more expensive, or less secure, and you should know the implications of the solution you select.
Furthermore, it is practically impossible to remember literally every feature, limitation and use case for more than 100+ services that AWS offers. There will therefore be questions that you simply do not know. Here, you will have no choice to make an educated guess, which is also where experience comes in. Even if it’s not practical experience, it will be experience from the Associate certifications.
Final Tips
Let’s wrap up the article with some personal tips:
- Do not try to achieve perfection. It will not work. AWS is simply too big for that. Try to achieve 70–80% correct on practice exams, where the questions tend to be slightly harder than on the real exam. There will always be some things you won’t know, but you should be able to pass.
- If during practising you encounter a service that you don’t know yet, google it and at least try to understand its main purpose. This way you can better identify distractors that may be presented in the exam. Although rare, it is possible that a fake service or feature is presented that doesn’t even exist.
- Do your Professional exams preferably in a test center where you can sit for a full three-hour run, fully concentrated and without being responsible for any technical issues if something goes wrong.
- Book the exam with the full fee if your employer pays for it, and then save up the 50% discount voucher for yourself after passing. If your employer doesn’t compensate you, in countries like Germany you can save the invoice and put the costs up on your annual tax returns.
- If you are not a native English speaker, be sure to apply for 30 minutes additional time. You only have to request this once. Find the instructions here (scroll down to ‘English as a second language’).
- If possible, take the whole day off. Book the exam around noon or in the early afternoon. Get a good night of sleep and do some exercising in the morning to get your brain ready for the day. Try to arrive early to the test center, take an earlier train or bus if you’re not going by car.
- Have a good meal around 2-3 hours beforehand. Load up on carbs, and do eat things you shouldn’t be eating normally, even if you’re dieting. In addition you can also eat a protein bar right before entering the test center. Due to the intensity of the exam, if you do not eat properly beforehand, you will start to lose concentration after 30–40 questions. Also drink some water and visit the toilet one more time right before starting. You will then be in an optimal condition to take the exam.
- Don’t flag too many questions. When doubting between two answers: Your first instinct is usually right. Stand by your first choice and don’t look back.
Good luck!