DevOps Engineering on AWS Certification Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield DevOps Engineering on AWS Certification facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. Which AWS CodeDeploy deployment type is supported for AWS Lambda functions? → Blue/green
2. Which AWS Global Accelerator feature improves availability by routing traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint across AWS regions? → Anycast IP with health-based routing
3. Which Amazon S3 feature prevents objects from being deleted or overwritten for a specified retention period? → S3 Object Lock
4. Which S3 feature allows you to automatically replicate objects to buckets in other AWS regions for disaster recovery? → Cross-Region Replication
5. Which CodeDeploy lifecycle event hook runs BEFORE the application revision is downloaded to the instance? → BeforeInstall
6. A CodeBuild project needs to cache Maven dependencies between builds. Which cache type should be configured? → Amazon S3 cache
7. In AWS CodeDeploy, what deployment configuration gradually shifts traffic from the original to the replacement environment? → Blue/green deployment
8. What AWS IAM feature allows you to set permission boundaries that limit the maximum permissions an IAM entity can have? → Permission boundaries
9. Which AWS service aggregates and visualizes logs from EC2, Lambda, ECS, and other AWS resources? → Amazon CloudWatch Logs
10. What does the appspec.yml file control in an AWS CodeDeploy deployment? → How CodeDeploy maps source files to destinations and lifecycle event hooks
11. Which buildspec.yml phase in CodeBuild is used to run the actual build commands? → build
12. In AWS CDK, which construct type represents opinionated, multi-resource patterns for common architectural use cases? → L3 constructs
13. Which AWS service provides managed Grafana workspaces for visualizing operational metrics? → Amazon Managed Grafana
14. What is the default retention period for AWS CloudTrail event history in the console? → 90 days
15. What is the name of the file in an AWS CodeBuild project that defines build commands and settings? → buildspec.yml
16. Which ELB type is optimized for handling millions of requests per second with ultra-low latency at the TCP layer? → Network Load Balancer
17. Which AWS service records API calls made in your AWS account, providing a full audit trail? → AWS CloudTrail
18. When using AWS CodeBuild, which environment variable is automatically provided and can be used to tag Docker images with the current build ID? → $CODEBUILD_BUILD_ID
19. Which deployment configuration in AWS CodeDeploy ensures that at least half of the instances remain in service during an in-place deployment? → CodeDeployDefault.HalfAtATime
20. A CodeBuild project intermittently fails with 'BUILD_GENERAL1_SMALL out of memory' errors during large test suites. What is the MOST appropriate fix? → Switch to a larger compute type such as BUILD_GENERAL1_MEDIUM or LARGE
21. Which feature of AWS CodeBuild allows you to cache dependencies to speed up future builds? → Build caching
22. In AWS CodeDeploy for ECS, what resource type defines the routing of traffic to the blue and green task sets? → Application Load Balancer listener rule
23. What is the purpose of an approval action in AWS CodePipeline? → Pauses the pipeline and waits for manual approval before proceeding
24. In AWS CodePipeline, what is the term for a set of actions that run in parallel within a stage? → Action Run Order
25. A microservice on EKS needs to access an S3 bucket without storing credentials in the pod. Which mechanism enables this using IAM? → Use IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA)
26. Which AWS policy type can be applied to an entire AWS Organization or OU to restrict the maximum permissions available to member accounts? → Service Control Policy (SCP)
27. Which AWS service provides automated recommendations to improve application availability, performance, security, and cost by analyzing your AWS environment? → AWS Trusted Advisor
28. What does Amazon CloudWatch Real User Monitoring (RUM) collect? → Performance data from real user browser sessions
29. When using AWS CodeDeploy with an in-place deployment strategy on EC2 instances, what happens to the application during the deployment? → The application on existing instances is stopped, updated, and restarted
30. Which CloudWatch feature automatically detects unusual patterns in metrics without requiring you to set static thresholds? → CloudWatch Anomaly Detection