I passed AWS Solutions Architect Associate last December. At the end of that post I mentioned I’d pursue the Professional tier next. Passed Solutions Architect Professional on February 15. Then took DevOps Engineer Professional on March 19.
One day of prep for each (the day before). I mostly banked on production experience. Most of what came up in the exam, I’ve encountered at work in some form.
SAP felt like a more comprehensive version of SAA. I finished in two hours out of three.
DOP was a lot harder than I expected. It was less about architecture and more on the specific behavior of AWS services. A lot of EKS questions came up and we don’t use Kubernetes at work. I guessed on those. I flagged 30 questions total. I went back and re-read each one carefully. I used the whole three hours, super exhausted. I was honestly bracing myself for retaking it. Luckily, I passed.
I joined my current role without even knowing what Terraform was. I only knew web development and LAMP stacks. I always had this doubt at the back of my mind whether I’m actually a cloud engineer or just got lucky landing the role. SAA felt too easy and didn’t really move the needle on that.
DOP being tough and still passing did. It’s not something someone could LLM their way around. Almost everything I relied on was things I actually learned on the job. That’s what made it feel different. I feel much more genuine with my title now. More confident with my voice. These exams showed me I can reason out architectural design decisions.
I don’t plan to take more certifications anytime soon. But if I ever did, it’d be CKA or CKAD. The amount of EKS questions on both exams made me realize how much I’m missing there. ECS is what we use at work but it’s AWS-only. Kubernetes is cloud-agnostic, can run anywhere including self-hosted, and it’s almost synonymous with DevOps at this point.
I want to widen the net.