I successfully passed the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional (DOP-C02) exam, so I’m sharing my experience.
Table of Contents
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Exam Result
- Score: 782/1000 (passing score: 750)
- Exam date/time: Monday, March 24, 2025, from 14:45 (test center)
- Passing notification (email): Monday, March 24, 2025, 20:15
Prerequisite Knowledge
- Already passed
SAA-C03,DVA-C02,SOA-C02,DAS-C01, andSCS-C02 - Had a little experience using Kubernetes at work
Study Method (Conclusion: CloudTech Only + ChatGPT)
My study period was 4 days. I went through the CloudTech question bank twice.
What I Did
- 1st pass: I worked on understanding by pasting each question and answer as a set into ChatGPT and digging deeper
- 2nd pass: For questions where I could immediately identify the answer, I left them as-is; for questions where I could not, I again pasted the question and answer as a set and dug deeper.
- It helped to actively try to remember things while going back and forth in conversation
The Actual Exam
My impression was that questions close to past questions (the question bank) were relatively scarce, at around 30%.
The CloudTech question bank felt somewhat outdated.
For example, for container-related questions, CloudTech had more ECS questions, but the actual exam had many more EKS (Kubernetes)-related questions.
Fortunately, between having touched Kubernetes a little at work and having studied it lightly out of personal interest, I somehow managed to handle the questions I was seeing for the first time.
Thoughts
This time, I had very little time to study, so I studied purely for the sake of passing. I was also personally dealing with some mental-health issues, so the study period was extremely difficult, but I somehow made it through.
My impression was that DOP did not have many questions that were close to past questions (though that may have just been the case this time). So relying only on “memorized knowledge” felt rough; I felt it was important to be able to articulate how you would make decisions when designing and operating systems in real work.
Finally
If you want to pass DOP, you should absolutely study Kubernetes.
The CloudTech question bank may be outdated, so if you are starting now, it seems better to study with the latest question banks available × ChatGPT.
p.s. I paid 49,800 yen for CloudTech’s one-time purchase plan, so I’m going to keep using CloudTech as far as it can take me…
