Prerequisites
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines and IaC on AWS
- Familiarity with CloudFormation, CodePipeline, and monitoring tools
- 5–6 hours of study time per day
Study Schedule
Day 1CI/CD Pipelines & Deployment Strategies
- CodePipeline stages, actions, and cross-account setup
- CodeDeploy deployment types (EC2, Lambda, ECS)
- Blue/green, canary, rolling, and immutable deployments
- Practice: 40 Domain 1 questions
Day 2CloudFormation & IaC
- Templates, stacks, stack sets, change sets, drift detection
- Custom resources, nested stacks, DeletionPolicy
- CDK constructs, CDK Pipelines, SAM templates
- Practice: 40 Domain 2 questions
Day 3Monitoring & Observability
- CloudWatch metrics, alarms, composite alarms, anomaly detection
- CloudWatch Logs, subscription filters, Logs Insights
- X-Ray tracing, sampling, annotations, service maps
- Practice: 40 Domain 4 questions
Day 4Resilience & DR
- Multi-AZ, multi-region architectures, fault isolation
- DR strategies: pilot light, warm standby, active-active
- Auto Scaling, health checks, self-healing
- Practice: 40 Domain 3 questions
Day 5Incident Response & Automation
- EventBridge rules, event-driven remediation
- Systems Manager Automation, Run Command, Patch Manager
- Runbooks, OpsCenter, operational readiness
- Practice: 40 Domain 5 questions
Day 6Security & Compliance
- IAM for DevOps, cross-account roles, permission boundaries
- Config rules, conformance packs, auto-remediation
- Security Hub, GuardDuty, Secrets Manager rotation
- Practice: 40 mixed questions
Day 7Full Mock Exam & Review
- Take a full 75-question mock exam (180 min)
- Review all incorrect answers and explanations
- Revisit weak domains and cheat sheets
- Final review of deployment strategies and IaC patterns
Study Tips
Focus on CI/CD and IaC — they dominate the exam
Know cross-account patterns inside and out
Practice designing automated remediation workflows end-to-end
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with DOP-C02 practice questions.