AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – ProfessionalStudy guide

Understand AWS CI/CD services—CodePipeline (orchestration), CodeBuild (build/test), CodeCommit (source), and CodeArtifact (dependency packages). Automate from code to deployment.

Understand low-risk deployments—CodeDeploy, in-place/blue-green, rolling/canary/linear. Release while minimizing downtime and blast radius.

Understand pipeline quality gates—automated tests, manual approval actions, artifacts (CodeArtifact/ECR), and CodeGuru. Stop bad changes before deployment.

Understand infrastructure as code—CloudFormation (templates/stacks), change sets, drift detection, and nested stacks. Manage infrastructure declaratively and reproducibly.

Understand deploying across accounts/regions—StackSets, IaC in programming languages (CDK), and SAM for serverless. Deploy infrastructure consistently at organizational scale.

Understand runtime configuration management—Systems Manager (Parameter Store/State Manager/Patch Manager), AWS Config (configuration evaluation), and Elastic Beanstalk. Maintain desired state and correct drift.

Understand demand-following design—Auto Scaling (dynamic/predictive/scheduled), ELB, scaling policies (target-tracking/step), and lifecycle hooks. Scale automatically with load.

Understand fault-tolerant design—Multi-AZ/Multi-Region, decoupling (SQS/SNS), self-healing (health checks + auto-replace), and Route 53 health checks/failover. Eliminate single points of failure.

Understand data protection and recovery—AWS Backup, snapshots, cross-region replication, and DR strategies (RTO/RPO). Recover reliably from failures and data loss.

Understand metric monitoring—CloudWatch metrics (standard/custom), alarms, composite alarms, dashboards, and EventBridge. Detect anomalies and drive notifications/automation.

Understand log collection and analysis—CloudWatch Logs, Logs Insights (queries), metric filters, subscription filters, and centralized logging (Amazon Data Firehose → S3/OpenSearch). Gain insight and detection from logs.

Understand unified observability—X-Ray (distributed tracing), ServiceLens, Synthetics (canaries), Container/Lambda Insights, and CloudTrail. Correlate metrics, logs, and traces to find causes fast.

Understand automated responses to events—EventBridge (rules/targets), CloudWatch alarms, EventBridge Scheduler, and SNS/SQS. Trigger actions automatically on state changes.

Understand automating detect-to-remediate—SSM Automation (runbooks), Config auto-remediation, Lambda remediation, and Auto Scaling self-healing. Correct drift without human intervention.

Understand incident notification and operations—SNS, EventBridge, Systems Manager Incident Manager, Chatbot (Slack/Teams), and dead-letter queues (DLQ). Reach the right people reliably and coordinate response.

Understand authorization for pipelines and runtimes—IAM roles, temporary credentials, Secrets Manager/Parameter Store, and OIDC federation. Eliminate long-lived keys and run securely with least privilege.

Understand continuous security governance—GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, Inspector, Macie, and auto-remediation. Run detect/evaluate/remediate automatically.

Understand data protection and trails—KMS (encryption), encryption at rest/in transit, CloudTrail (API auditing), S3 Object Lock/versioning, and tamper-proof trails. Meet compliance requirements.