Prerequisites
- AWS Associate-level certification or equivalent experience
- Basic understanding of CI/CD, IaC, and monitoring concepts
- 2–3 hours of study time per day
Study Schedule
Days 1–3CI/CD Fundamentals
- CodePipeline architecture, stages, and actions
- CodeBuild buildspec.yml phases and artifact management
- CodeDeploy appspec.yml and lifecycle hooks
- Practice: 30 SDLC Automation questions
Days 4–7Advanced Deployments & Week 1 Review
- Blue/green, canary, rolling deployments across EC2/Lambda/ECS
- Cross-account pipelines and approval gates
- Elastic Beanstalk deployment policies
- Mini mock: 30 Domain 1 questions
Days 8–11CloudFormation & CDK
- Template deep dive: parameters, conditions, mappings, outputs
- Stack sets, drift detection, custom resources
- CDK constructs, synthesis, testing, CDK Pipelines
- Practice: 30 Domain 2 questions
Days 12–14SAM & Config Management
- SAM templates, sam local, SAM Accelerate
- Systems Manager Parameter Store and Secrets Manager
- Config rules, conformance packs, auto-remediation
- Week 2 review: 30 mixed Domain 1–2 questions
Days 15–18Monitoring & Observability
- CloudWatch metrics, alarms, composite alarms, anomaly detection
- CloudWatch Logs, subscription filters, Logs Insights queries
- X-Ray distributed tracing, sampling, annotations
- Practice: 30 Domain 4 questions
Days 19–21Resilience & Week 3 Review
- Multi-AZ and multi-region architectures
- DR strategies, RTO/RPO, Route 53 failover
- Auto Scaling, ECS circuit breaker, self-healing
- Mini mock: 30 Domain 3–4 questions
Days 22–25Incident Response & Security
- EventBridge event-driven automation patterns
- SSM Automation runbooks, Run Command, Patch Manager
- GuardDuty, Security Hub, Config compliance automation
- Practice: 30 Domain 5 questions
Days 26–30Full Mocks & Final Review
- Take two full 75-question mock exams (180 min each)
- Review all incorrect answers and weak domains
- Final review of cheat sheets and flashcards
- Exam strategy: time management for 75 questions in 180 min
Study Tips
Dedicate extra time to CI/CD and IaC — they account for 39% of the exam
Practice designing cross-account automation workflows on paper
Review EventBridge → Lambda → SSM patterns repeatedly
Take detailed notes on what you get wrong in mock exams
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with DOP-C02 practice questions.