AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional Certification and Beyond

Adam Book

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781801071512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Certification Guides in Computer Science
• Index: Computer Science

Explore the ins and outs of becoming an AWS certified DevOps professional engineer with the help of easy-to-follow practical examples and detailed explanationsKey Features• Discover how to implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS• Explore real-world scenarios and hands-on examples that will prepare you to take the DOP-C01 exam with confidence• Learn from enterprise DevOps scenarios to prepare fully for the AWS certification examBook DescriptionThe AWS Certified DevOps Engineer certification is one of the highest AWS credentials, vastly recognized in cloud computing or software development industries. This book is an extensive guide to helping you strengthen your DevOps skills as you work with your AWS workloads on a day-to-day basis.You'll begin by learning how to create and deploy a workload using the AWS code suite of tools, and then move on to adding monitoring and fault tolerance to your workload. You'll explore enterprise scenarios that'll help you to understand various AWS tools and services. This book is packed with detailed explanations of essential concepts to help you get to grips with the domains needed to pass the DevOps professional exam. As you advance, you'll delve into AWS with the help of hands-on examples and practice questions to gain a holistic understanding of the services covered in the AWS DevOps professional exam. Throughout the book, you'll find real-world scenarios that you can easily incorporate in your daily activities when working with AWS, making you a valuable asset for any organization.By the end of this AWS certification book, you'll have gained the knowledge needed to pass the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer exam, and be able to implement different techniques for delivering each service in real-world scenarios.What you will learn• Automate your pipelines, build phases, and deployments with AWS-native tooling• Discover how to implement logging and monitoring using AWS-native tooling• Gain a solid understanding of the services included in the AWS DevOps Professional exam• Reinforce security practices on the AWS platform from an exam point of view• Find out how to automatically enforce standards and policies in AWS environments• Explore AWS best practices and anti-patterns• Enhance your core AWS skills with the help of exercises and practice testsWho this book is forThis book is for AWS developers and SysOps administrators looking to advance their careers by achieving the highly sought-after DevOps Professional certification. Basic knowledge of AWS as well as its core services (EC2, S3, and RDS) is needed. Familiarity with DevOps concepts such as source control, monitoring, and logging, not necessarily in the AWS context, will be helpful.

Section 1: Establishing the Fundamentals

In this part, we will look at the fundamentals of the AWS cloud, including the basis of the Well-Architected Framework, security, and storage.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Amazon Web Service Pillars
• Chapter 2, Fundamental AWS Services
• Chapter 3, Identity and Access Management and Working with Secrets in AWS
• Chapter 4, Amazon S3 Blob Storage
• Chapter 5, Amazon DynamoDB

Chapter 1: Amazon Web Service Pillars

DevOps is, at its heart, a combination of the skills of development and operations and breaking down the walls between these two different teams. DevOps includes enabling developers to perform operational tasks easily. DevOps also involves empowering operational team members to create their Infrastructure as Code and use other coding techniques, such as continuous integration pipelines, to spin up the same infrastructure in multiple regions quickly.

In this book, we will go through the services and concepts that are part of the DevOps professional exam so that you have a solid understanding from a practical standpoint, in terms of both explanations and hands-on exercises.

Becoming Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified not only gives you instant validation of the technical skills that you hold and maintain – it also strengthens you as a technical professional. The AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Certification is a cumulative test that incorporates the base knowledge of fundamental AWS services, including system operations capabilities for running, managing, and monitoring workloads in AWS. This is in addition to developing and deploying code to functions, containers, and instances.

We go look at the test itself in more depth in Chapter 23, Overview of the DevOps Professional Certification Test, as well as provide tips for taking the exam.

The AWS pillars are the five guiding principles that guide architects and developers in generally accepted cloud architecture and design. They are subtly referenced in the DevOps Professional exam, but the pillars and their guidelines are tenets of best practices for working with any cloud service provider – especially Amazon Web Services. These are all guiding principles in DevOps practices and pipelines, and having a sound understanding of these five items will not only help you come exam time, but serve you throughout your DevOps career journey.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• Operational excellence
• Security
• Reliability
• Performance efficiency
• Cost optimization

Service pillars overview

At first glance, you may be wondering why we aren't just jumping right into AWS, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and other DevOps topics. The main reason is that these five pillars are the foundational fabric of the exams. In addition, they will help you provide the most effective, dependable, and efficient environment for your company or clients. These design principles are not only important when architecting for success on Amazon Web Services, or any cloud provider for that matter, but in guiding the practices that you use throughout your day-to-day endeavors.

Once you become familiar with these pillars, you will see them and their themes in the testing questions as you go down your path for certification. This is especially true when working to obtain the DevOps Professional Certification as there are specific sections for Operations, Security, and Reliability.

The following are the five pillars of a well-architected framework:

• Operational excellence
• Security
• Reliability
• Performance efficiency
• Cost optimization

Use these pillars as the guiding principles, not only for designing your workloads in AWS but also for improving and refactoring current workloads. Every organization should strive to achieve well-architected applications and systems. Therefore, improving any AWS applications you are working on will make you a valuable asset. Now, let's look at each of these pillars in detail.

Operational excellence

As we look at the operational excellence pillar, especially in the context of DevOps, this is one – if not the most – important service pillar for your day-to-day responsibilities. We will start by thinking about how our teams are organized; after all, the DevOps movement came about from breaking down silos between Development and Operations teams.

Question – How does your team determine what its priorities are?

* Does it talk to customers (whether they're internal or external)?

* Does it get its direction from product owners who have drawn out a roadmap?

Amazon outlines five design principles that incorporate operational excellence in the cloud:

• Performing Operations as Code
• Refining operations frequently
• Making small, frequent, and reversible changes
• Anticipating failure
• Learning from all operational failures

Let's take a look at each of these operational design principals in detail to see how they relate to your world as a DevOps engineer. As you go through the design principles of not only this pillar but all the service pillars, you will find that the best practices are spelled out, along with different services, to help you complete the objective.

Performing Operations as Code

With the contrivance of Infrastructure as Code, the cloud allows teams to create their applications using code alone, without the need to interact with a graphical interface. Moreover, it allows any the underlying networking, services, datastores, and more that's required to run your applications and workloads. Moving most, if not all, the operations to code does quite a few things for a team:

• Distributes knowledge quickly and prevents only one person on the team from being able to perform an operation
• Allows for a peer review of the environment to be conducted, along with quick iterations
• Allows changes and improvements to be tested quickly, without the production environment being disrupted

In AWS, you can perform Operations as Code using a few different services, such as CloudFormation, the Cloud Development Kit (CDK), language-specific software development kits (SDK), or by using the command-line interface (CLI).

Refining operations frequently

As you run your workload in the cloud, you should be in a continual improvement process for not only your application and infrastructure but also your methods of operation. Teams that run in an agile process are familiar with having a retrospective meeting after each sprint to ask three questions: what went well, what didn't go well, and what has room for improvement?

Operating a workload in the cloud presents the same opportunities for retrospection and to ask those same three questions. It doesn't have to be after a sprint, but it should occur after events such as the following:

• Automated, man...