How to become a Certified AWS Devops Engineer

Summary

This article covers the devops process, the role of devops engineers, and the skills required to become an AWS Certified devops engineer.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

What is Devops?

In the development lifecycle developers, sysadmins, and programmers usually work in different silos. Devops is a philosophy that seeks to bridge the gap between each of these roles. It describes a set of operations in which the product development lifecycle works together to make the procedure faster, automated, and stable. This leads to a shortened lead time between fixes, and fewer software failures. Above all, devops best practices allow businesses to scale up fast, reduce operation costs, and improve application reliability. In this article you will learn what it takes to become a Certified AWS Devops Engineer.

What is a Devops engineer?

Devops engineers are experienced IT professionals who work with developers, QA professionals, and IT operations. Additionally, they are heavily involved in the software development lifecycle, working with devops automation tools, CI CD tools, application software, and cloud infrastructure. Lastly, they oversee code releases, facilitate IT changes, and make sure the IT environment runs smoothly. 

What are the job responsibilities of a Devops Engineer?

The following are some expected roles, responsibilities, and skills that is expected from a Devops Engineer:

• Deploy, automate, maintain, and manage the application production system.
• Ensure higher levels of availability, scalability, and performance of application code and infrastructure.
• Create strategies to ensure compliance of the process with Devops principles.
• Perform system troubleshooting and problem-solving across platform and application domains.
• Ability to manage project effectively through open, standards-based platforms
• Analyze, design and evaluate automation scripts & systems
• Ensure critical resolution of system issues by using the best cloud security solutions services
• Provide support to cloud architects for the facility of operation and migration services to ensure availability and delivery of cloud computing services

Devops Engineer Salary

Studying to become an AWS devops engineer has a huge payout once you get certified. The average salary for a DevOps Engineer in US is $140,000. The additional cash compensation for a DevOps Engineer in US is $15,291. The total compensation for a DevOps Engineer in US is $140,766. This salary will depend on how many years of experience, so if you’re new to devops engineering don’t expect this to be your starting salary.

AWS Devops automation Tools

If you’re interested in transforming your engineering career into devops, you should definitely have some experience with cloud services like AWS. The AWS cloud consists of two kinds of services: Compute services (EC2, S3, DNS, Route 53) and Infrastructure Services (VPC, Lambda, ELB). AWS offers a plethora of devops related tools that engineers employ when building automation in the cloud. AWS Devops automation tools automate manual tasks, help teams manage complex environments at scale, and keep engineers in control of the high velocity that is enabled by devops.  Every engineer should be familiar with all AWS Devops tools. To get current on these tools and services read up on the following AWS Devops Services:

• Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration 
  • Code Pipelines
  • Codebuild
  • Code Deploy
  • Codestar
• Microservices
  • Elastic Container Service
  • Lambda
• Infrastructure as code
  • Cloud Formation
  • Ops Work
  • Systems Manager
  • Config
• Monitoring and logging
  • Cloudwatch
  • X-Ray
  • Cloudtrail
• Platform as a service
  • Elastic Beanstalk
• Version Control
  • Code Commit

Useful Devops Automation Tools 

As you can see, there are many powerful set of devops automation tools and building systems that improve time to market. However, there are other devops tools outside of AWS that great engineers use in conjunction with cloud services.  To accelerate into being a great devops engineer, one should be familiar with these tools too:

• Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration:
  • Jenkins
  • Vagrant
  • Ansible
  • Puppet 

• Containers:
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes

• Monitoring and alerting:
  • SignalFX
  • Splunk
  • Raygun

Recommended AWS Knowledge

It is recommended to have some experience with AWS cloud services before you take the AWS Certified Devops Engineer Exam. If you have this experience, passing the AWS Devops exam will be much easier. Here is some base requirements that will assist in leveling up with the AWS Certification:

• 2 or more years of experience provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments
• Be able to code in at least one high-level programming language
• Build highly automated infrastructures
• Administer operating systems
• Understand modern development and operations processes and methodologies

AWS Certified Devops Engineer Exam 

The AWS exam costs $300. It is possible to use a discount code provided by the different course providers in order to reduce this cost. Additionally, if you need a classroom environment to learn, you can sign up for paid AWS training course. However, if paid training cost is concern, AWS offers free online courses for all levels. The Certification Track includes short videos on a wide range of topics to assist the student in aws certification questions answers. The AWS Certified Devops Professional exam is intended for individuals who perform a devops role with two or more years of experience provisioning, operating, and managing AWS Devops environments.

AWS Devops Abilities Validated by the Certification

Taking the AWS Certified Devops Engineer exam demonstrates the following skills:

• Implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS
• Implement and automate security controls, governance processes, and compliance validation
• Define and deploy monitoring, metrics, and logging systems on AWS
• Implement systems that are highly available, scalable, and self-healing on the AWS Devops platform
• Design, manage, and maintain tools to automate operational processes

Careers as AWS Devops Engineer

If you obtain an AWS certification for Devops Professionals you will be a cut above the rest. Passing the exams is highly coveted by a lot of professional services organizations and tech companies. With a lot of enterprise companies moving to the cloud from on premise data centers, there is a high demand for certified AWS engineers everywhere. Devops consulting firms like Gennovacap are always looking for AWS Devops Engineers to employ cost savings for their clients using cutting edge AWS Devops strategies.