AWS DevOps Engineer (DOP-C02) trap evaluation

Choosing capability over constraint satisfaction

A recurring failure on DOP-C02 is reading the deployment context wrong rather than the service wrong. Selecting in-place deployment when the scenario specifies zero-downtime and a narrow rollback window is a constraint miss, and candidates who know the services well still make it. A second consistent trap is operational complexity overreach: building custom Lambda-based automation for tasks that SSM Automation handles natively, or designing bespoke pipeline logic when CodePipeline covers the pattern directly. Both traps show up in candidates who are otherwise well-prepared.