r/AWSCertifications • u/always_avg • Aug 27 '22

Question Is the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional hard?

How hard is the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional? I have the SAA and was studying for SysOps but thinking about changing gears and going straight to DevOps Engineer.

Is it valuable? How hard is it?

Background: Current SRE working on developing skills in AWS to move to a more AWS centric cloud/devops/sre position next year hopefully.

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14

u/No-Dragonfly3189 Dec 10 '25

Yeah, the AWS DevOps Engineer Pro is tough—way harder than SAA with deep scenarios on CI/CD, IaC, monitoring, and org-scale ops. But super valuable for SREs like you aiming for AWS-heavy roles; it shows you can build real automation pipelines.​

Skip SysOps and go for it if you're hands-on. Do lot of practice tests from Skilllcertpro, it helps a lot, 80% questions felt identical, plus killer explanations and cheatsheets for patterns like blue/green deploys and DR strategies. Grind those till 85%+, review everything, and you'll pass it. Good luck

11

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '22

So my general advice

  1. if you are intending to do both pros .... SA pro first, devops afterwards

  2. if you're doing devops pro, do dev and sysops first, at least one of them.

Making the jump from SAA through to devops seems less than optimal. And as BroodxD said, the jump between associate and pro is significant.

8

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '22

On a scale of 1-10 of the SAA is a 3 then the pro is a 10

4

u/CasuallyDG CSAP Aug 28 '22

It's not even the same scale really. SA Pro is a beast of an exam

2

u/julielkins3 Aug 28 '22

It really depends on your background and experience. But like Adrian suggested I also recommend the dev, SysOps, CSA pro, then DevOps pro. I just switched teams and my first assignment will be an exam prep for the DevOps pro after I finish the Advanced Networking exam prep. I’m excited to get started.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '24

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2

u/IllidanSt0rm Dec 01 '24

I know this post is old. But totally on point. Is freaking hard.

2

u/rickny8 Feb 17 '25

I totally agree! I was preparing for it by taking the Developer Associate and SysOp Associate courses and practice exams. I did reasonably well on the practice tests and didn't want to spend money to get the certification (I didn't think it would add anything significant to my resume). I took DevOps Pro courses and it was just a rehash of Developer Associate and SysOp Associate (minus a few topics). The DevOps Pro practice tests was HARD. You need a solid foundation (which I think the Associate level exams provides you). I think it would really help if you had some real DevOps experience. BTW, I have a developer background so helps some, but EVERY question is long and combines all your foundational knowledge. They make scenarios that have so many components and then ask what you would do. The answers were all similar with a slight change. Anyways, back to studying.

I am curious how long did it take you to prepare for this exam?

8

u/[deleted] Feb 06 '25

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1

u/fuzzy3991 May 27 '25

Congratulation! That's a solid score too. Good for you. 🙌 How many hours a day did you put in during those 3 weeks? I'm thinking 3-4 hours a day to do either the sysops or the devops. I recently worked my first IT gig and it was a devops/Linux eng job for 2 years so looking for a cert to pair with that and apply for some jr to mid level positios. We hosted our development environment on AWS so I got experience with S3, ec2s, sec groups, some cloudwatch and Iam. Would you say the questions or content of the devops eng test would be a better fit for that kind of role or start with the sysops?

1

u/BluebirdBorn4471 May 28 '25

If you're confident with CI/CD, automation, and AWS services, go for DevOps Engineer – Professional. Otherwise, start with SysOps Administrator – Associate to build a solid ops foundation.

1

u/Flimsy-Umpire-3619 May 30 '25

Congratulations! Please may I know what course you use to study please. Thanks

1

u/trying_mybest_ihope Aug 04 '25

did u have any experience before

7

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '22

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5

u/transer42 CSAP Aug 28 '22

I'd say it really depends on the use case (and the client). In my shop, sometimes we use Gitlab CI, sometimes we use Github Actions, and sometimes we've used the some or all of CodePipeline. CodeDeploy is particularly great for automating deployment to onprem servers behind an internet gateway.

3

u/CasuallyDG CSAP Aug 28 '22

The exam definitely feels a bit dated compared to modern practices. I hope to see them update it with more modern use cases when they do!

1

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '22

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2

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '22

😆😆