Prerequisites
- AWS Associate certification (SAA, DVA, or SOA recommended)
- Basic familiarity with CI/CD concepts and Linux administration
- 1–2 hours of study time per day
Study Schedule
Weeks 1–2CI/CD Foundations
- CodeCommit, CodePipeline architecture, source actions
- CodeBuild deep dive: buildspec, environments, caching
- CodeDeploy EC2, Lambda, and ECS deployment types
- Hands-on: build a multi-stage pipeline
Weeks 3–4Advanced CI/CD & Deployment Strategies
- Blue/green, canary, and rolling with real services
- Cross-account pipelines, IAM roles, KMS encryption
- Elastic Beanstalk deployment policies and .ebextensions
- Practice: 50+ Domain 1 questions
Weeks 5–6Infrastructure as Code
- CloudFormation templates, intrinsic functions, pseudo parameters
- Stack sets, nested stacks, drift detection, change sets
- CDK constructs, stacks, apps, testing, CDK Pipelines
- Hands-on: convert a manual architecture to IaC
Weeks 7–8Configuration & Secrets Management
- SAM templates and serverless deployments
- Systems Manager: Parameter Store, Session Manager, Run Command
- Secrets Manager rotation and cross-account access
- Practice: 50+ Domain 2 questions
Weeks 9–10Monitoring, Logging & Tracing
- CloudWatch deep dive: custom metrics, EMF, Logs Insights
- Composite alarms, anomaly detection, dashboards
- X-Ray: distributed tracing, service maps, annotations
- Hands-on: implement cross-account observability
Weeks 11–12Resilience, Incident Response & Security
- DR strategies, multi-region, Auto Scaling, fault isolation
- EventBridge automation, SSM Automation runbooks
- Config, Security Hub, GuardDuty, compliance automation
- Practice: 50+ Domain 3–5 questions
Week 13Final Review & Mock Exams
- Take 2–3 full 75-question mock exams
- Deep review of all incorrect answers
- Final cheat sheet and flashcard review
- Exam day strategy and time management
Study Tips
Build real CI/CD pipelines in your free-tier account — hands-on is essential
Focus on understanding WHY each service exists, not just HOW it works
The exam loves cross-account, multi-region scenarios — practice these
Take detailed notes and create your own diagrams for complex patterns
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with DOP-C02 practice questions.