AWS 101
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AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam Survival Guide

Window: Global | 75 scenario Q / 180 min

Must-do topics

• CI/CD: CodeCommit/Build/Deploy/Pipeline; blue/green & canary via CodeDeploy, Lambda, ECS/EKS
• IaC & config: CloudFormation/CDK; StackSets; SSM Parameter Store/Secrets Manager; AMI pipelines
• Observability: CloudWatch metrics/alarms/logs, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry, health dashboards
• Reliability & scaling: Auto Scaling patterns, ALB/NLB, multi-AZ, multi-Region, chaos testing
• Security/compliance: IAM boundaries/SCPs, KMS, artifact signing, least privilege pipelines
• Cost & operations: tagging, budgets, Trusted Advisor, S3 lifecycle, rightsizing

Top traps (avoid)

• Re-inventing deployment when CodeDeploy/blue-green exists
• Storing secrets in plain env vars; use Secrets Manager/SSM
• Logging without structured fields → weak insights
• Ignoring drift detection and change sets in CloudFormation
• Picking EC2 for what Lambda/containers solve elastically

Time split

• ~2.4 min/Q; first pass for service-fit; second pass for edge controls

Last-48h checklist

• Blue/green vs rolling vs canary matrix; ALB/NLB use-cases
• CFN change sets, StackSets, nested stacks; drift detection
• SSM Run Command, Patch Manager; Session Manager (no bastions)
• Multi-account governance: AWS Organizations, SCPs, RAM

Quick facts

• CodeDeploy supports EC2, ECS, Lambda; canary/linear configs
• Session Manager = shell access without opening inbound ports
• AppConfig for feature flags + safe rollouts
• X-Ray traces requests across services for bottleneck finding

Speed tactics

• Identify bottleneck or risk (deploy, config, secrets, rollback) → pick managed fix
• Prefer immutable infra (AMI/images) and declarative changes (CFN/CDK)
• Bake in observability + rollback in every pipeline

Day-of mini-plan

• Warm-up: draw CI/CD boxes (CC/CB/CD/CP) + rollback path
• Pace: 25 Q/hour; flag 10 scenario epics for end
• Re-read asks for SLOs (RTO/RPO), compliance, and blast radius