Certification guide
The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) is one of AWS’s two Professional-tier credentials — the senior operational certification, sitting alongside Solutions Architect – Professional as the ceiling of the AWS certification path. It validates that you can design, build, and operate the entire delivery machine that keeps modern AWS workloads shipping and running: continuous delivery pipelines, infrastructure as code, resilient multi-account architectures, monitoring and logging, incident response, and the security controls that hold it all together.
This is not the certification a developer earns as a first AWS cert. AWS’s target profile calls for at least two years of hands-on AWS experience in a DevOps role, plus fluency in a programming or scripting language, IaC, containers, and CI/CD tooling. The exam assumes you have already lived through a real incident, argued with CloudFormation about a rollback, and rewritten a canary configuration at 2 AM.
Code · DOP-C02 Level · Professional 75 questions 180 minutes Pass · 750 / 1000 Cost · $300 USD Validity · 3 years Delivery · Pearson VUE or online proctor
Questions are multiple choice and multiple response, delivered as scenario-heavy prose that describes a real DevOps situation and asks you to pick the best action or architecture. Answer options are close together on purpose — two or three will look defensible, and one will be better along the exact dimension the scenario emphasizes (blast radius, RTO, cost, rollback behavior, operational load). Ten of the seventy-five questions are unscored and used by AWS to calibrate future items; you will not know which ones. AWS reports a scaled score between 100 and 1000 with 750 as the passing mark.
Six content domains structure the blueprint. The weightings shown below are AWS’s official 2026 percentages and drive the item count for each practice set on Certifym.
SDLC Automation
Domain 1 · 22%The heaviest domain. Continuous integration and continuous delivery on AWS end-to-end: CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodeCommit, CodeArtifact; deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling, all-at-once) across EC2, ECS, EKS, and Lambda; automated testing gates; pipeline execution modes; cross-account, cross-region orchestration; and the artifact-management practices that make releases traceable.
Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code
Domain 2 · 17%Defining infrastructure declaratively and keeping it that way. CloudFormation, AWS CDK, StackSets, Service Catalog; drift detection and recovery; AWS Systems Manager for configuration compliance and Run Command; AppConfig for runtime configuration delivery; secrets and parameters via Secrets Manager and Parameter Store; and the multi-account rollout patterns that keep environments consistent.
Resilient Cloud Solutions
Domain 3 · 15%Designing for the failure modes AWS gives you and the ones your workload creates. Multi-AZ and multi-region patterns; Auto Scaling and predictive scaling; RDS Multi-AZ, Aurora Global Database, DynamoDB Global Tables; disaster recovery strategies (backup-restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active) and how to pick between them; SQS, DLQs, and idempotent retry; and the RTO/RPO reasoning that keeps DR planning honest.
Monitoring and Logging
Domain 4 · 15%The observability stack DevOps engineers wire up so incidents become tractable. CloudWatch metrics, alarms, composite alarms, dashboards, Logs Insights; the CloudWatch agent, Container Insights, and Application Insights; AWS X-Ray for distributed tracing; centralized log aggregation across accounts via subscription filters, Firehose, S3, and Athena; and the ingestion-versus-retention cost model.
Incident and Event Response
Domain 5 · 14%Automated and human-in-the-loop response. EventBridge event patterns and targets; Systems Manager Automation runbooks and Incident Manager; Config auto-remediation; ChatOps via AWS Chatbot; escalation plans and on-call schedules; and the design of runbooks that a tired responder can actually execute safely at 3 AM.
Security and Compliance
Domain 6 · 17%Guardrails that scale across many accounts. IAM roles, cross-account access, session-scoped permissions; AWS Organizations, Service Control Policies, and IAM Identity Center; AWS Config, Security Hub, GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie for detection and posture; KMS and Secrets Manager for encryption and secret rotation; image signing with AWS Signer; and the audit evidence that satisfies compliance without slowing releases.
Certifym publishes ten independent 65-question practice sets for DOP-C02. Each set is domain-weighted to the official DOP-C02 blueprint (D1 = 14, D2 = 11, D3 = 10, D4 = 10, D5 = 9, D6 = 11) so that a passing raw score on any set is an honest raw-score equivalent of what the real exam would ask you to do. The pass mark on each set is 75%, mapping to the real 750-of-1000 scaled score AWS uses. Questions are original and Professional-tier throughout — multiple options are defensible in every question, and exactly one is best along the dimension the scenario names, so passing depends on judgment and not luck in the heavy ones.
AWS DevOps Engineer Professional - Practice Exam
Practice exam for the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional (DOP-C02) certification. Covers SDLC automation, configuration management and infrastructure as code, resilient cloud solutions, monitoring and…
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All questions, answers, and explanations on Certifym are original content written for practice purposes. They are not actual AWS examination questions and are not represented as such. Practicing with these materials does not guarantee a passing result on any live certification exam.