In this post, I share my experience passing the AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional exam, including study strategy, mock exams, time management and exam-day tactics.
Introduction
Back in March 2022, I wrote about passing the AWS Certified Developer – Associate certification. More recently, in May 2026, I took the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional – my first AWS Professional certification.
I don’t usually write about exam prep — the strategies are personal, the technology moves fast, and there’s no shortage of good advice already out there. But I don’t see much written about the gap between the Associate and Professional certifications, so I thought I’d share my experience in this post.
First, I’ll examine some of those differences in detail. Then I’ll outline my study approach. Finally, I’ll share some survival tactics I used during the exam. And along the way, you’ll find out why one of my Steamhaus colleagues compared one of my strategies to the Pepe Silvia scene from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Professional vs Associate
This section explores some of the key differences between the AWS Associate and Professional certifications.
Before diving in, a quick note. Both AWS and Tutorials Dojo (which I’ll discuss later) offer excellent practice resources. While AWS still hosts older sample question PDFs (many of which haven’t been updated since 2022), the best place for their official materials is now the free tier of the AWS Skill Builder platform.
Scenario Length
The most obvious difference between the AWS Associate and Professional questions is length.
Professional exam questions are often much longer, sometimes two to three times as long as the Associate ones. And not all provided information is relevant. A major part of these exams is your ability to filter out noise and identify which constraints matter.
As evidence, look at this zoomed-out screenshot of Question 7 from the AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional sample PDF. I mean, LOOK AT IT.
It’s the entire page long! And, as I’ll discuss later, there’s not much time to read questions like these either. As for why many Professional questions are longer…
Knowledge vs Judgment
Associate questions generally check your understanding of what a service does. Professional questions assume you already know the technical terms and instead test your judgment over what actions to take.
To explore this, the Solutions Architect track offers the nearest like-for-like comparison. Let’s contrast Question 4 from the Solutions Architect – Associate sample exam questions:
With Question 3 from the Solutions Architect – Professional sample exam questions:
While the questions are thematically similar, they differ significantly in areas including:
Structure: The Associate question has a single correct answer. The Professional question requires two answers, each addressing a different layer of the architecture. This requires an understanding of how the services interact.
Scope: The Associate question focuses on a single service to solve a straightforward problem. The Professional question looks at the entire request pipeline: S3 serving the frontend, API Gateway handling the POST request and Lambda processing in the background. You must debug the whole system, not just choose the right service.
Detail: The Associate question provides only essential information. The Professional question includes additional elements that provide further context. It mentions that the team successfully tested each API method in the AWS console, which rules out server-side failures. Understanding this distinction is crucial for effective debugging.
Domain Structure
Associate exams focus on specific technical domains. Depending on the certification, these domains may include architectural best practices, development tasks or operational duties. Each domain is separate, making it easier to study and concentrate on one topic at a time.
Professional exams do not have clear boundaries. They require you to integrate knowledge from multiple domains at the same time, revealing something significant about what is actually being tested.
To see this in action, let’s look at the Solutions Architect track. The current version of the Solution Architect – Associate exam guide focuses on four domains:
- Design Secure Architectures
- Design Resilient Architectures
- Design High-Performing Architectures
- Design Cost-Optimised Architectures
These domains focus on the technical qualities of a workload. They closely align with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and test the ability to identify the right services, apply best practices and recognise common design mistakes.
Conversely, the Solutions Architect – Professional exam guide takes a very different approach:
- Design Solutions for Organisational Complexity
- Design for New Solutions
- Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions
- Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernisation
These domains are action-oriented and contextual, each specifying an action to perform rather than a quality to evaluate. They are open-ended and organisationally aware, rarely having a single correct answer.
Revision Strategy
This section explores my ways of preparing for the AWS DevOps Engineer Professional certification, including courses, mock exams and mental models.
Career Experience & Courses
2026 marks my tenth year working in technology, with the most recent two as an AWS Consultant at Steamhaus. While my day-to-day role naturally exposes me to several aspects of the DevOps Professional blueprint, it doesn’t cover all of them. That is where targeted courses come in.
I’m a longtime fan of Stephane Maarek, and had already bought his AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional Udemy course in a previous sale. The course covers a lot, but I felt less confident after finishing it than after his Associate courses. His DevOps course combines new lectures with material from his Associate courses. As a result, I found that some modules reinforced concepts I had already learned from the Associate-level material instead of providing the deeper context I wanted.
To fill the gaps, I used one of my Community Builder benefits – a free QA subscription. Danny Jessee‘s DOP-C02 preparation course covered similar topics to Maarek’s but delivered several lectures with the greater technical depth that I was seeking. The hands-on labs were also a massive help in demystifying some of the services and features I don’t often use.
With those gaps filled, it was time to start testing.
Mock Exams
Mock exams are likely the most valuable part of my study process. Since earning my first cloud certification in 2019, I have relied on the Maarek course and the associated Tutorials Dojo exams for each AWS certification.
Tutorials Dojo (TD) offers practice exams, cheat sheets and labs for several cloud certifications, including AWS, Azure and GCP. Each TD question bank has several modes, which I usually tackle in this order:
Section-Based: This mode focuses on specific topics and domains, giving the correct answer and a detailed explanation immediately after each question. This is great at flagging things I’ve misremembered, misunderstood or simply never touched, letting me refine my knowledge without burning through the question bank.
Review: This mode is more open-ended, posing questions from multiple domains. It isn’t timed and gives answers and explanations as before. I use this mode to build the mental stamina needed to answer large blocks of questions in bulk.
Timed: This mode mimics the exam. Questions are given under timed conditions, with a full report only upon completion. While some questions in the bank will now be familiar, this approach teaches me the strategies and timings I need for the actual exam.
After each session, I review the answers and identify topics and domains that are unfamiliar or problematic. What I do next with this knowledge has changed over the years…
Connecting The Dots
There’s no single correct way to use the results of a mock exam. Personally, I like to look for patterns in the areas where I’m struggling and connect them to topics I already understand.
For example, I was getting some ELB routing questions wrong, so I used my existing Route53 routing knowledge to fill in some gaps. I also had issues with some Elastic Beanstalk questions because I’m not a big user of the service, so I stepped away from the practice exams entirely to do a deep dive into the documentation and FAQs.
My goal isn’t to memorise answers. It’s to understand why an answer is correct well enough to recognise the same pattern in other questions. This eventually evolved into building mental models: connecting unfamiliar concepts to existing knowledge rather than collecting isolated facts. It’s an approach influenced by books like Make It Stick and How to Take Smart Notes, both of which argue that writing is a tool for understanding rather than simply recording information.
I like to write things down because it forces me to use my own words and highlights gaps in my understanding. It also encourages selectivity – since space is limited, every word must earn its place.
I’ve used several methods for this over the years, including:
- Flashcard apps like Anki.
- Ring binders with A4 notes and diagrams.
- Blank A3 sheets as wall posters.
And now…
Pepe’s Whiteboard
Which brings us to my latest iteration and the reason for this post’s title – a whiteboard, several index cards and loads of fridge magnets:
While I could write directly on the whiteboard, the paper and magnets let me move, group, replace and reorganise cards without forcing a complete rewrite of the board.
This combines several benefits from the other systems:
- Anki’s ease of note creation, tagging and movement.
- The binder’s ease of writing notes on my own terms and in my own words.
- The poster’s visibility and its ability to passively reinforce study material.
It also proved useful in the final days before the exam. Any cards that were still causing problems could be moved from the main board onto smaller, portable boards for targeted revision:
This still has limitations, of course. It’s not portable as a complete knowledge source. The whiteboard also has limited space – in fact, I ultimately had to branch out to a nearby plastic box for overflow!
Despite the space constraints, I’m definitely a fan of this whiteboard approach and will use it for future exams. I might augment it with digital second brain tools like Obsidian or Google’s NotebookLM to inform what deserves a card, and I’ll be looking into this in the coming months.
Survival Tactics
This section examines some of my survival tactics for the AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional certification exam by optimising time, embracing personal kindness and checking my understanding.
The Maths is a Lie
The Professional exams have 75 questions with 180 minutes to answer them. This averages out at 2 minutes 24 seconds per question. In contrast, the Associate exams consist of 65 questions that must be answered in 130 minutes, averaging 2 minutes per question.
You may conclude from this that the Professional exam gives you a bit more breathing room. And you would be wrong.
I previously mentioned that the Professional questions are longer and more complex compared to the Associate questions. These factors quickly eat those ‘extra’ 24 seconds. Many candidates have noted anecdotally that the timing of the Professional exams is very tight and, having now taken one, I completely agree!
My preferred strategy is to go through the questions in order and get a quick gut feel for confidence. If the question involves services I frequently use, or if the answer is well established from my studies then I’ll answer it. If not, I flag it and move on. I’ll try to make this decision within 30 seconds.
My initial goal is to see all 75 questions with as close to 90 minutes remaining as possible. This way, when I reach the end of the questions, I know how many are unanswered and how long I have left to answer them. I can then revisit these questions using a more methodical approach, potentially drawing on other questions I have already answered.
However, this required a change to the way I recorded my progress…
Kindness Through Panic
Since my earliest certifications, I’ve used a Gut Feel system using my own notepad during mocks and the test centre’s whiteboards during exams. I create an empty table with three confidence ratings:
- 100: I’m 100% sure of the answer.
- 5050: I’ve narrowed it down to two answers.
- ?: I have no idea.
As I move through the questions, each question number is recorded in one of these rows.
However, there’s nothing here for situations where I’ve speed-read the question and chosen not to answer it. The closest option was ‘?‘, but that means ‘I don’t know the answer’, whereas I wanted ‘I haven’t properly read the question‘.
Enter my latest addition: PANIC.
Panic is somewhat hard to articulate, so I’ll describe how I use it. A question will get Panic if my initial thoughts are along the lines of:
- I’m currently panicking (I mean yeah – Ed).
- I don’t want to try this question yet (for whatever reason).
- I don’t feel ready to try this question yet (for whatever reason).
Or any other reason – this list isn’t exhaustive.
Professional exams are expensive, time-consuming and complex. It is completely reasonable to get adrenaline and anxiety in this situation. Panic lets me be kind to myself and build some forward momentum. I can then do second, third and fourth passes to attack the Panic queue.
It’s similar to an SQS queue visibility timeout. When a Panic question is pulled from the queue, it temporarily disappears. While it’s invisible, I can process other messages without it blocking my progress. Once I’ve completed my first pass, the timeout expires, the message reappears and I can handle it with fresher eyes and more context from the questions I’ve already answered.
At the end of an exam, I end up with something like this:
Combining this physical ledger with the exam software’s flagging feature lets me track unanswered questions and the reasons for skipping them. This gives me more mental bandwidth to actually answer the questions.
Hallucinations Aren’t Limited to AI
One of the biggest mistakes I repeatedly made during my mock exams was adding details that weren’t in the text. Who says AI is the only thing that can hallucinate?
I’ll illustrate what I mean with a paraphrased mock exam question:
A company has confidential files in an Amazon S3 bucket. Actions on objects need to be monitored, such as PUT, GET, and DELETE. The goal is to easily search for and review these actions for auditing purposes.
Four answers were provided. I narrowed it down to two options, one of which seemed wrong because it would trigger unnecessary Lambda executions.
But this answer was correct. And the reason my chosen answer would never have worked? It assumed a CloudTrail trail was already enabled on the bucket. The Lambda answer didn’t make that assumption, explicitly enabling the trail as a step. I’d hallucinated a prerequisite into existence because it’s what I’d have done instinctively in a real environment. Oops! This wasn’t the only time I caught myself out like that either.
So yes. Read the question. Then READ THE QUESTION. And then choose the answer that fits the requirements, not the one that needs some bending and stretching. And not the one that you’ve hallucinated into correctness.
Summary
Going into the AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional exam, I wasn’t sure what to expect. A harder version of the Associate exam? A different beast entirely?
As it turned out, both are true. The transition from Associate to Professional reminds me of the progress I’ve experienced in my own career. In my earlier roles, I primarily solved clearly defined problems with straightforward solutions. In my current consulting role, I concentrate on understanding context, navigating ambiguity, evaluating trade-offs and making decisions when no clear right answer exists.
While I did find the exam brutal, it does exactly what it sets out to do. I must often make important architectural and procedural decisions under time pressure and with appropriate justification, and the DevOps Pro held up a mirror to that perfectly. Would I do another? Absolutely. Although next time I might need a second whiteboard.
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