AWS DevOps Engineer Professional: DOP-C02 Preparation

Prepare for the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional certification through advanced explanations, architecture analysis, and practical automation exercises. Develop skills in delivery pipelines, infrastructure as code, resilience, observability, incident response, and security on AWS. Apply these skills in labs and a capstone, with quizzes and exam-style scenario analysis to reinforce decision-making.

Level: advanced · 40 lessons · about 20 h · Free · AI-assisted course created by Sandip Das

What you will learn

• Design automated delivery pipelines with deployment strategies, validation gates, and rollback mechanisms.
• Implement repeatable AWS infrastructure and configuration management using infrastructure as code.
• Design resilient workloads with recovery strategies aligned to availability and recovery objectives.
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting to diagnose performance and operational issues.
• Automate incident response and remediation using AWS event-driven workflows.
• Apply least privilege, secrets management, and security controls across infrastructure and delivery pipelines.
• Evaluate DOP-C02-style scenarios and justify AWS service choices and operational trade-offs.
• Integrate delivery, observability, resilience, and security in an AWS DevOps capstone.

Course outline

1. Repeatable Infrastructure and Configuration

Establish an advanced AWS sandbox workflow and manage repeatable infrastructure, fleet configuration, and tested machine images.

1. DOP-C02 Readiness and Safe Sandbox Design (30 min) · free preview
   Map the six exam domains to an operational architecture and establish permissions, cost limits, evidence collection, and cleanup practices for course exercises.
2. Design Reusable CloudFormation Stacks (30 min)
   Build a parameterized stack and reason about lifecycle boundaries, dependencies, outputs, and change-set review.
3. Scale IaC with StackSets and CDK Pipelines (30 min)
   Compare multi-account stack distribution with application delivery through bootstrapped CDK environments.
4. Maintain Fleet State with Systems Manager (30 min)
   Use managed-node configuration tools and troubleshoot agent connectivity without opening inbound administrative ports.
5. Guided Lab: Patch Compliance and Tested Images (30 min)
   Plan a constrained patch-and-image exercise with validation, cleanup, and scenario questions contrasting mutable and immutable fleet maintenance.

2. Identity, Secrets, and Organization Guardrails

Apply least privilege and layered controls to AWS automation while keeping secrets and compliance remediation auditable.

1. Reason About IAM Trust and Permissions (30 min)
   Analyze automation access paths by separating who may assume a role from what that role may do.
2. Manage Configuration and Secret Access (30 min)
   Select Parameter Store or Secrets Manager based on access and rotation needs without exposing sensitive values in automation.
3. Layer Preventive, Detective, and Proactive Controls (30 min)
   Compare organization guardrails, Config evaluation, and CloudFormation hooks by enforcement time and coverage.
4. Centralize Findings and Govern Remediation (30 min)
   Connect security tooling and configuration findings to tested Automation actions with explicit ownership and approval boundaries.
5. Guided Lab: Validate an Automation Guardrail (30 min)
   Exercise a low-risk configuration control and review access-denied and noncompliance scenarios without applying irreversible account restrictions.

3. Continuous Integration and Delivery Pipelines

Build artifact-driven pipelines with secure build stages, validation gates, and cross-account or cross-Region delivery.

1. Model Pipeline Stages, Triggers, and Artifacts (30 min)
   Trace a source revision through serial and parallel actions and define reproducible artifact handoffs.
2. Build, Test, and Cache Without Weakening Isolation (30 min)
   Design a CodeBuild validation stage and compare caching benefits with host affinity and privileged-mode risks.
3. Secure Cross-Account Pipeline Artifacts (30 min)
   Trace role assumption, S3 access, and KMS permissions from a pipeline account into a target account.
4. Design Cross-Region Delivery and Approval Gates (30 min)
   Place regional artifact stores correctly and incorporate approval timeouts and quota planning into delivery design.
5. Guided Lab: Diagnose a Broken Pipeline (30 min)
   Use a small source-build-test pipeline to investigate artifact, build, permission, and approval failures with a module scenario checkpoint.

4. Deployment Strategies and Rollback Safety

Select release strategies by capacity, availability, validation, and compatibility constraints rather than assuming every rollback is safe.

1. Choose Rolling, Immutable, or Traffic-Split Releases (30 min)
   Compare deployment strategies using workload capacity, temporary cost, release risk, and evaluation time.
2. Control CodeDeploy Health and Rollback (30 min)
   Design an EC2 deployment group with agent prerequisites, minimum healthy hosts, alarm checks, and explicit rollback conditions.
3. Make Application and Data Transitions Reversible (30 min)
   Analyze why healthy old and new releases can still fail during transition and use staged reader-writer compatibility.
4. Design Evidence-Based Promotion Gates (30 min)
   Combine test evidence, health checks, alarms, manual approval, and compatibility checks into a promotion decision.
5. Guided Lab: Stop and Recover a Failed Release (30 min)
   Introduce a controlled release failure and evaluate whether alarm-driven rollback restores both service health and data compatibility.

5. Availability, Backup, and Disaster Recovery

Align fault isolation, lifecycle automation, backup protection, and tested recovery with business availability and data-loss objectives.

1. Translate RTO and RPO into Architecture (30 min)
   Evaluate Multi-AZ and multi-Region designs and disaster recovery patterns against downtime, data loss, cost, and complexity.
2. Coordinate Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks (30 min)
   Use launch and termination hooks to control readiness and cleanup without leaving instances indefinitely waiting.
3. Protect Recovery Points Across Accounts (30 min)
   Design backup copies using organization membership, vault policies, KMS permissions, and deliberate retention protection.
4. Measure Recovery with Restore Testing (30 min)
   Define scheduled restore tests and application validation rather than treating backup success as proof of recoverability.
5. Guided Lab: Validate a Recovery Plan (30 min)
   Run a small reversible recovery exercise, document actual recovery evidence, and evaluate resilience scenarios without enabling irreversible locks.

6. Monitoring, Logging, and Operational Diagnosis

Correlate metrics, logs, traces, and configuration history while choosing appropriate cross-account and cross-Region telemetry architectures.

1. Design CloudWatch Signals and Actionable Alarms (30 min)
   Translate workload health questions into service and custom metrics, dashboards, alarm conditions, and operational actions.
2. Correlate Logs, Metrics, and Traces (30 min)
   Follow a request through an instrumented application and use complementary signals to distinguish latency, errors, and resource pressure.
3. Choose Shared Observability or Centralized Logs (30 min)
   Compare regional OAM links with cross-account, cross-Region log copying and identify access, organization, and historical-data constraints.
4. Investigate Configuration-Related Incidents (30 min)
   Combine AWS Config history and relationships with operational telemetry to test whether a change explains a symptom.
5. Guided Lab: Diagnose a Workload Regression (30 min)
   Investigate a bounded application regression using a hypothesis-driven sequence of dashboard, log, trace, and configuration checks.

7. Event-Driven Incident Response and Remediation

Build reliable event-to-action workflows that distinguish delivery failures, processing failures, approvals, and post-remediation validation.

1. Route Operational Events and Capture Delivery Failures (30 min)
   Connect operational findings to targets and design EventBridge target DLQs and monitoring for failed delivery.
2. Make Queue-Driven Response Retry-Safe (30 min)
   Analyze Lambda polling, visibility timeouts, batch failures, and duplicate processing in a remediation worker.
3. Gate High-Impact Actions with Automation Approvals (30 min)
   Build a response runbook with scoped execution, approval, containment, validation, and recovery branches.
4. Test Response Workflow Failure Boundaries (30 min)
   Analyze missing permissions, undelivered events, repeated messages, rejected approvals, and unsuccessful corrective actions before enabling automation.
5. Guided Lab: Detect, Approve, and Verify Remediation (30 min)
   Trigger a benign sandbox condition, run a bounded response workflow, and verify correction, failure capture, and cleanup.

8. Integrated Capstone and Exam Decision-Making

Integrate secure delivery and operations in a small AWS workload, then use evidence and timed scenario analysis to identify remaining readiness gaps.

1. Capstone Part 1: Architecture and Acceptance Contract (30 min)
   Scope a small workload and specify delivery, security, telemetry, recovery, cost, and cleanup requirements before implementation.
2. Capstone Part 2: Implement Secure Delivery (30 min)
   Assemble earlier lab artifacts into an IaC-managed workload and a tested deployment pipeline rather than building a new production platform.
3. Capstone Part 3: Prove Recovery and Response (30 min)
   Exercise a deployment or workload fault, correlate telemetry, verify approved remediation, and package evidence before cleanup.
4. Timed DOP-C02 Scenario Review (30 min)
   Complete an original mixed-domain scenario checkpoint and explain decisions by requirements, integration constraints, and operational trade-offs.
5. Readiness Review and Architecture Defense (30 min)
   Consolidate decision-oriented cheat sheets, answer interview-style architecture questions, and build a targeted revision plan from capstone and quiz evidence.

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