AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Course in South Africa

Task Statement 1.1: Implement CI/CD pipelines.

Knowledge of:

• Software development lifecycle (SDLC) concepts, phases, and models
• Pipeline deployment patterns for single- and multi-account environments

Skills in:

• Configuring code, image, and artifact repositories
• Using version control to integrate pipelines with application environments
• Setting up build processes (for example, AWS CodeBuild)
• Managing build and deployment secrets (for example, AWS Secrets
• Manager, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store)
• Determining appropriate deployment strategies (for example, AWS CodeDeploy)

Task Statement 1.2: Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.

Knowledge of:

• Different types of tests (for example, unit tests, integration tests, acceptance tests, user interface tests, security scans)
• Reasonable use of different types of tests at different stages of the CI/CD pipeline

Skills in:

• Running builds or tests when generating pull requests or code merges (for example, CodeBuild)
• Running load/stress tests, performance benchmarking, and application testing at scale
• Measuring application health based on application exit codes
• Automating unit tests and code coverage
• Invoking AWS services in a pipeline for testing

Task Statement 1.3: Build and manage artifacts.

Knowledge of:

• Artifact use cases and secure management
• Methods to create and generate artifacts
• Artifact lifecycle considerations

Skills in:

• Creating and configuring artifact repositories (for example, AWS CodeArtifact, Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Container Registry [Amazon ECR])
• Configuring build tools for generating artifacts (for example, CodeBuild, AWS Lambda)
• Automating Amazon EC2 instance and container image build processes (for example, EC2 Image Builder)

Task Statement 1.4: Implement deployment strategies for instance, container, and serverless environments.

Knowledge of:

• Deployment methodologies for various platforms (for example, Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Container Service [Amazon ECS], Amazon Elastic
• Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS], Lambda)
• Application storage patterns (for example, Amazon Elastic File System [Amazon EFS], Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store [Amazon EBS])
• Mutable deployment patterns in contrast to immutable deployment patterns
• Tools and services available for distributing code (for example, CodeDeploy, EC2 Image Builder)

Skills in:

• Configuring security permissions to allow access to artifact repositories (for example, AWS Identity and Access Management [IAM], CodeArtifact)
• Configuring deployment agents (for example, CodeDeploy agent)
• Troubleshooting deployment issues
• Using different deployment methods (for example, blue/green, canary)

Task Statement 2.1: Define cloud infrastructure and reusable components to provision and manage systems throughout their lifecycle.

Knowledge of:

• Infrastructure as code (IaC) options and tools for AWS
• Change management processes for IaC-based platforms
• Configuration management services and strategies

Skills in:

• Composing and deploying IaC templates (for example, AWS Serverless Application Model [AWS SAM], AWS CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit [AWS CDK])
• Applying CloudFormation StackSets across multiple accounts and AWS Regions
• Determining optimal configuration management services (for example, AWS OpsWorks, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Config, AWS AppConfig)
• Implementing infrastructure patterns, governance controls, and security standards into reusable IaC templates (for example, AWS Service Catalog, CloudFormation modules, AWS CDK)

Task Statement 2.2: Deploy automation to create, onboard, and secure AWS accounts in a multi-account or multi-Region environment.

Knowledge of:

• AWS account structures, best practices, and related AWS services

Skills in:

• Standardizing and automating account provisioning and configuration
• Creating, consolidating, and centrally managing accounts (for example, AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower)
• Applying IAM solutions for multi-account and complex organization structures (for example, SCPs, assuming roles)
• Implementing and developing governance and security controls at scale (AWS Config, AWS Control Tower, AWS Security Hub, Amazon Detective, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Service Catalog, SCPs)

Task Statement 2.3: Design and build automated solutions for complex tasks and large-scale environments.

Knowledge of:

• AWS services and solutions to automate tasks and processes
• Methods and strategies to interact with the AWS software-defined infrastructure

Skills in:

• Automating system inventory, configuration, and patch management (for example, Systems Manager, AWS Config)
• Developing Lambda function automations for complex scenarios (for example, AWS SDKs, Lambda, AWS Step Functions)
• Automating the configuration of software applications to the desired state (for example, OpsWorks, Systems Manager State Manager)
• Maintaining software compliance (for example, Systems Manager)

Task Statement 3.1: Implement highly available solutions to meet resilience and business requirements.

Knowledge of:

• Multi-AZ and multi-Region deployments (for example, compute layer, data layer)
• SLAs
• Replication and failover methods for stateful services
• Techniques to achieve high availability (for example, Multi-AZ, multi-Region)

Skills in:

• Translating business requirements into technical resiliency needs
• Identifying and remediating single points of failure in existing workloads
• Enabling cross-Region solutions where available (for example, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront)
• Configuring load balancing to support cross-AZ services
• Configuring applications and related services to support multiple
• Availability Zones and Regions while minimizing downtime

Task Statement 3.2: Implement solutions that are scalable to meet business requirements.

Knowledge of:

• Appropriate metrics for scaling services
• Loosely coupled and distributed architectures
• Serverless architectures
• Container platforms

Skills in:

• Identifying and remediating scaling issues
• Identifying and implementing appropriate auto scaling, load balancing, and caching solutions
• Deploying container-based applications (for example, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS)
• Deploying workloads in multiple Regions for global scalability
• Configuring serverless applications (for example, Amazon API Gateway, Lambda, AWS Fargate)

Task Statement 3.3: Implement automated recovery processes to meet RTO and RPO requirements.

Knowledge of:

• Disaster recovery concepts (for example, RTO, RPO)
• Backup and recovery strategies (for example, pilot light, warm standby)
• Recovery procedures

Skills in:

• Testing failover of Multi-AZ and multi-Region workloads (for example, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Route 53, CloudFront)
• Identifying and implementing appropriate cross-Region backup and recovery strategies (for example, AWS Backup, Amazon S3, Systems Manager)
• Configuring a load balancer to recover from backend failure

Task Statement 4.1: Configure the collection, aggregation, and storage of logs and Metrics.

Knowledge of:

• How to monitor applications and infrastructure
• Amazon CloudWatch metrics (for example, namespaces, metrics, dimensions, and resolution)
• Real-time log ingestion
• Encryption options for at-rest and in-transit logs and metrics (for example, client-side and server-side, AWS Key Management Service [AWS KMS])
• Security configurations (for example, IAM roles and permissions to allow for log collection)

Skills in:

• Securely storing and managing logs
• Creating CloudWatch metrics from log events by using metric filters
• Creating CloudWatch metric streams (for example, Amazon S3 or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose options)
• Collecting custom metrics (for example, using the CloudWatch agent)
• Managing log storage lifecycles (for example, S3 lifecycles, CloudWatch log group retention)
• Processing log data by using CloudWatch log subscriptions (for example, Kinesis, Lambda, Amazon OpenSearch Service)
• Searching log data by using filter and pattern syntax or CloudWatch Logs Insights
• Configuring encryption of log data (for example, AWS KMS)

Task Statement 4.2: Audit, monitor, and analyze logs and metrics to detect issues.

Knowledge of:

• Anomaly detection alarms (for example, CloudWatch anomaly detection)
• Common CloudWatch metrics and logs (for example, CPU utilization with Amazon EC2, queue length with Amazon RDS, 5xx errors with an
• Application Load Balancer [ALB])
• Amazon Inspector and common assessment templates
• AWS Config rules
• AWS CloudTrail log events

Skills in:

• Building CloudWatch dashboards and Amazon QuickSight visualizations
• Associating CloudWatch alarms with CloudWatch metrics (standard and custom)
• Configuring AWS X-Ray for different services (for example, containers, API Gateway, Lambda)
• Analyzing real-time log streams (for example, using Kinesis Data Streams)
• Analyzing logs with AWS services (for example, Amazon Athena, CloudWatch Logs Insights)

Task Statement 4.3: Automate monitoring and event management of complex environments.

Knowledge of:

• Event-driven, asynchronous design patterns (for example, S3 Event Notifications or Amazon EventBridge events to Amazon Simple Notification Service [Amazon SNS] or Lambda)
• Capabilities of auto scaling for a variety of AWS services (for example, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, RDS storage auto scaling, DynamoDB, ECS capacity provider, EKS autoscalers)
• Alert notification and action capabilities (for example, CloudWatch alarms to Amazon SNS, Lambda, EC2 automatic recovery)
• Health check capabilities in AWS services (for example, ALB target groups, Route 53)

Skills in:

• Configuring solutions for auto scaling (for example, DynamoDB, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, RDS storage auto scaling, ECS capacity provider)
• Creating CloudWatch custom metrics and metric filters, alarms, and notifications (for example, Amazon SNS, Lambda)
• Configuring S3 events to process log files (for example, by using Lambda) and deliver log files to another destination (for example, OpenSearch Service, CloudWatch Logs)
• Configuring EventBridge to send notifications based on a particular event pattern
• Installing and configuring agents on EC2 instances (for example, AWS Systems Manager Agent [SSM Agent], CloudWatch agent)
• Configuring AWS Config rules to remediate issues
• Configuring health checks (for example, Route 53, ALB)

Task Statement 5.1: Manage event sources to process, notify, and take action in response to events.

Knowledge of:

• AWS services that generate, capture, and process events (for example, AWS Health, EventBridge, CloudTrail)
• Event-driven architectures (for example, fan out, event streaming, queuing)

Skills in:

• Integrating AWS event sources (for example, AWS Health, EventBridge, CloudTrail)
• Building event processing workflows (for example, Amazon Simple Queue Service [Amazon SQS], Kinesis, Amazon SNS, Lambda, Step Functions)

Task Statement 5.2: Implement configuration changes in response to events.

Knowledge of:

• Fleet management services (for example, Systems Manager, AWS Auto Scaling)
• Configuration management services (for example, AWS Config)

Skills in:

• Applying configuration changes to systems
• Modifying infrastructure configurations in response to events
• Remediating a non-desired system state

Task Statement 5.3: Troubleshoot system and application failures.

Knowledge of:

• AWS metrics and logging services (for example, CloudWatch, X-Ray)
• AWS service health services (for example, AWS Health, CloudWatch, Systems Manager OpsCenter)
• Root cause analysis

Skills in:

• Analyzing failed deployments (for example, AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CloudFormation, CloudWatch synthetic monitoring)
• Analyzing incidents regarding failed processes (for example, auto scaling, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS)

Task Statement 6.1: Implement techniques for identity and access management at scale.

Knowledge of:

• Appropriate usage of different IAM entities for human and machine access (for example, users, groups, roles, identity providers, identity-based policies, resource-based policies, session policies)
• Identity federation techniques (for example, using IAM identity providers and AWS IAM Identity Center)
• Permission management delegation by using IAM permissions boundaries
• Organizational SCPs

Skills in:

• Designing policies to enforce least privilege access
• Implementing role-based and attribute-based access control patterns
• Automating credential rotation for machine identities (for example, Secrets Manager)
• Managing permissions to control access to human and machine identities (for example, enabling multi-factor authentication [MFA], AWS Security Token Service [AWS STS], IAM profiles)

Task Statement 6.2: Apply automation for security controls and data protection.

Knowledge of:

• Network security components (for example, security groups, network ACLs, routing, AWS Network Firewall, AWS WAF, AWS Shield)
• Certificates and public key infrastructure (PKI)
• Data management (for example, data classification, encryption, key management, access controls)

Skills in:

• Automating the application of security controls in multi-account and multi-Region environments (for example, Security Hub, Organizations, AWS Control Tower, Systems Manager)
• Combining security controls to apply defence in depth (for example, AWS Certificate Manager [ACM], AWS WAF, AWS Config, AWS Config rules, Security Hub, GuardDuty, security groups, network ACLs, Amazon Detective, Network Firewall)
• Automating the discovery of sensitive data at scale (for example, Amazon Macie)
• Encrypting data in transit and data at rest (for example, AWS KMS, AWS CloudHSM, ACM)

Task Statement 6.3: Implement security monitoring and auditing solutions.

Knowledge of:

• Security auditing services and features (for example, CloudTrail, AWS Config, VPC Flow Logs, CloudFormation drift detection)
• AWS services for identifying security vulnerabilities and events (for example, GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, IAM Access Analyzer, AWS Config)
• Common cloud security threats (for example, insecure web traffic, exposed AWS access keys, S3 buckets with public access enabled or encryption disabled)

Skills in:

• Implementing robust security auditing
• Configuring alerting based on unexpected or anomalous security events
• Configuring service and application logging (for example, CloudTrail, CloudWatch Logs)
• Analyzing logs, metrics, and security findings