Many organizations have their own cloud services, resulting in fierce competition with other cloud services to be the best. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the top cloud services, with a positive impact on individuals and businesses worldwide. The AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C01) exam is designed for developers with one or more years of experience creating and supporting AWS-based applications.
AWS service includes features like Data encryption and various access controls which provide data security over the cloud. AWS can also host dynamic websites that run various web and application servers. It also includes the ability to work with hybrid abilities.
This exam, on the other hand, assesses your knowledge of:
- To begin, demonstrate knowledge of core AWS service uses and fundamental AWS architecture best practices.
- Second, use AWS to demonstrate proficiency in designing, deploying, and troubleshooting cloud-based applications.
Let us look at strategies to pass AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam!
AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam Survival Map
The AWS Developer Associate Certification (DVA-C01) exam is intended to assess your knowledge and skills in deploying, developing, and debugging cloud-based applications using AWS and its basic architecture. AWS Developer Associate exam will assist candidates in developing a strong understanding of AWS core services and best practices in AWS architecture. These steps will help you get through –
Step 1 – Know Exam Details
These are the details you need to know about the exam –
The ANS-C01 exam contains 65 multiple-choice and multiple-response questions. The AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty exam lasts 170 minutes (or 2 hours 50 minutes). Furthermore, This exam costs $300 USD, so if you have previously passed an AWS exam, make sure to use your 50% exam voucher to significantly reduce your exam cost. Moreover, you can take the exam online or at a Pearson Vue/PSI testing center.
Step 2 – Go through Knowledge Requirements
The AWS Certified Developer – Associate certification is intended for individuals who have one or more years of hands-on experience developing and maintaining AWS-based applications. AWS recommends that you have the following items before taking this exam:
- Expertise in at least one high-level programming language
- Understanding of core AWS services, their applications, and fundamental AWS architecture best practices such as the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, application lifecycle management, and the use of containers in the development process.
- Ability to develop, deploy, and debug cloud-based applications using AWS, as well as write code for serverless applications
- Capability to identify key features of AWS services and write applications using AWS service APIs, AWS CLI, and SDKs
- Ability to write code using a basic understanding of cloud-native applications
- Authoring, maintaining, and debugging code modules on AWS
Step 3 – Develop a Clear Understanding of these topics
These are the domains that you need to cover –
AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C02) updated course outline.
Domain 1: Development with AWS Services
Task statement 1: Develop code for applications hosted on AWS.
Knowledge of:
- Architectural patterns (for example, event-driven, microservices, monolithic, choreography,
orchestration, fanout) (AWS Documentation: What is an Event-Driven Architecture?) - Idempotency (AWS Documentation: Ensuring idempotency)
- Differences between stateful and stateless concepts (AWS Documentation: Stateful or Stateless)
- Differences between tightly coupled and loosely coupled components (AWS Documentation: Loosely Coupled Scenarios, Tightly Coupled Scenarios)
- Fault-tolerant design patterns (for example, retries with exponential backoff and jitter, deadletter queues) (AWS Documentation: Building well-architected serverless applications, Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter)
- Differences between synchronous and asynchronous patterns (AWS Documentation: Synchronous and Asynchronous Express Workflows)
Skills in:
- Creating fault-tolerant and resilient applications in a programming language (for example, Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go) (AWS Documentation: What is AWS Lambda?, Resilience in AWS Lambda)
- Creating, extending, and maintaining APIs (for example, response/request transformations, enforcing validation rules, overriding status codes) (AWS Documentation: Use a mapping template to override an API’s request, Amazon API Gateway concepts)
- Writing and running unit tests in development environments (for example, using AWS Serverless Application Model [AWS SAM]) (AWS Documentation: Build and Test a Serverless Application, Getting started with AWS SAM)
- Writing code to use messaging services (AWS Documentation: Creating an example messaging application)
- Writing code that interacts with AWS services by using APIs and AWS SDKs
- Handling data streaming by using AWS services
Task Statement 2: Develop code for AWS Lambda.
Knowledge of:
- Event source mapping (AWS Documentation: Lambda event source mappings)
- Stateless applications
- Unit testing
- Event-driven architecture (AWS Documentation: What is an Event-Driven Architecture?)
- Scalability
- The access of private resources in VPCs from Lambda code (AWS Documentation: Configuring a Lambda function to access resources in a VPC)
Skills in:
- Configuring Lambda functions by defining environment variables and parameters (for example, memory, concurrency, timeout, runtime, handler, layers, extensions, triggers, destinations) (AWS Documentation: Configuring Lambda function options, Using AWS Lambda environment variables, Configuring AWS Lambda functions)
- Handling the event lifecycle and errors by using code (for example, Lambda Destinations, dead-letter queues) (AWS Documentation: Amazon SQS dead-letter queues, Using Lambda with Amazon SQS)
- Writing and running test code by using AWS services and tools (AWS Documentation: Developer Tools)
- Integrating Lambda functions with AWS services (AWS Documentation: Using AWS Lambda with other services)
- Tuning Lambda functions for optimal performance (AWS Documentation: Profiling functions with AWS Lambda Power Tuning)
Task Statement 3: Use data stores in application development.
Knowledge of:
- Relational and non-relational databases (AWS Documentation: What is NoSQL?, Relational (SQL) or NoSQL)
- Create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations (AWS Documentation: Performing Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations)
- High-cardinality partition keys for balanced partition access
- Cloud storage options (for example, file, object, databases) (AWS Documentation: Storage)
- Database consistency models (for example, strongly consistent, eventually consistent) (AWS Documentation: Read consistency, Consistency Model)
- Differences between query and scan operations (AWS Documentation: Best practices for querying and scanning data)
- Amazon DynamoDB keys and indexing
- Caching strategies (for example, write-through, read-through, lazy loading, TTL) (AWS Documentation: Caching strategies)
- Amazon S3 tiers and lifecycle management (AWS Documentation: Managing your storage lifecycle)
- Differences between ephemeral and persistent data storage patterns (AWS Documentation: Comparing your on-premises storage patterns with AWS Storage services)
Skills in:
- Serializing and deserializing data to provide persistence to a data store
- Using, managing, and maintaining data stores
- Managing data lifecycles
- Using data caching services
Domain 2: Security
Task Statement 1: Implement authentication and/or authorization for applications and AWS services.
Knowledge of:
- Identity federation (for example, Security Assertion Markup Language [SAML], OpenID Connect [OIDC], Amazon Cognito) (AWS Documentation: SAML identity providers (identity pools))
- Bearer tokens (for example, JSON Web Token [JWT], OAuth, AWS Security Token Service [AWS STS]) (AWS Documentation: Using bearer tokens)
- The comparison of user pools and identity pools in Amazon Cognito (AWS Documentation: What is Amazon Cognito?)
- Resource-based policies, service policies, and principal policies (AWS Documentation: Identity-based policies and resource-based policies, How IAM roles differ from resource-based policies)
- Role-based access control (RBAC) (AWS Documentation: Role-based access control)
- Application authorization that uses ACLs (AWS Documentation: Access control list (ACL) overview)
- The principle of least privilege (AWS Documentation: Security best practices in IAM)
- Differences between AWS managed policies and customer-managed policies (AWS Documentation: Managed policies and inline policies)
- Identity and access management (IAM) (AWS Documentation: What is IAM?)
Skills in:
- Using an identity provider to implement federated access (for example, Amazon Cognito, AWS Identity and Access Management [IAM])
- Securing applications by using bearer tokens
- Configuring programmatic access to AWS
- Making authenticated calls to AWS services
- Assuming an IAM role
- Defining permissions for principals
Task Statement 2: Implement encryption by using AWS services.
Knowledge of:
- Encryption at rest and in transit (AWS Documentation: Encrypting Data-at-Rest and -in-Transit)
- Certificate management (for example, AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority) (AWS Documentation: What is AWS Private CA?, Requesting a private PKI certificate)
- Key protection (for example, key rotation) (AWS Documentation: Rotating AWS KMS keys)
- Differences between client-side encryption and server-side encryption (AWS Documentation: Client-side and server-side encryption)
- Differences between AWS managed and customer-managed AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys (AWS Documentation: AWS KMS concepts, Basic concepts)
Skills in:
- Using encryption keys to encrypt or decrypt data
- Generating certificates and SSH keys for development purposes
- Using encryption across account boundaries
- Enabling and disabling key rotation
Task Statement 3: Manage sensitive data in application code.
Knowledge of:
- Data classification (for example, personally identifiable information [PII], protected health information [PHI]) (AWS Documentation: Personally identifiable information (PII))
- Environment variables (AWS Documentation: Environment variables to configure the AWS CLI)
- Secrets management (for example, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store) (AWS Documentation: Referencing AWS Secrets Manager secrets from Parameter Store parameters, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store)
- Secure credential handling (AWS Documentation: AWS security credentials)
Skills in:
- Encrypting environment variables that contain sensitive data
- Using secret management services to secure sensitive data
- Sanitizing sensitive data
Domain 3: Deployment
Task Statement 1: Prepare application artifacts to be deployed to AWS.
Knowledge of:
- Ways to access application configuration data (for example, AWS AppConfig, Secrets Manager, Parameter Store) (AWS Documentation: AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store)
- Lambda deployment packaging, layers, and configuration options (AWS Documentation: Lambda deployment packages, Creating and sharing Lambda layers)
- Git-based version control tools (for example, Git, AWS CodeCommit) (AWS Documentation: What is AWS CodeCommit?, Getting started with Git and AWS CodeCommit)
- Container images
Skills in:
- Managing the dependencies of the code module (for example, environment variables, configuration files, container images) within the package
- Organizing files and a directory structure for application deployment
- Using code repositories in deployment environments
- Applying application requirements for resources (for example, memory, cores)
Task Statement 2: Test applications in development environments.
Knowledge of:
- Features in AWS services that perform application deployment (AWS Documentation: AWS Deployment Services, Overview of Deployment Options on AWS)
- Integration testing that uses mock endpoints (AWS Documentation: Set up mock integrations in API Gateway)
- Lambda versions and aliases (AWS Documentation: Lambda function aliases)
Skills in:
- Testing deployed code by using AWS services and tools
- Performing mock integration for APIs and resolving integration dependencies
- Testing applications by using development endpoints (for example, configuring stages in Amazon API Gateway)
- Deploying application stack updates to existing environments (for example, deploying an AWS SAM template to a different staging environment)
Task Statement 3: Automate deployment testing.
Knowledge of:
- API Gateway stages (AWS Documentation: Setting up a stage using the API Gateway console)
- Branches and actions in the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow (AWS Documentation: CI/CD on AWS)
- Automated software testing (for example, unit testing, mock testing) (AWS Documentation: Integrating with automated tests)
Skills in:
- Creating application test events (for example, JSON payloads for testing Lambda, API Gateway, AWS SAM resources)
- Deploying API resources to various environments
- Creating application environments that use approved versions for integration testing (for example, Lambda aliases, container image tags, AWS Amplify branches, AWS Copilot environments)
- Implementing and deploying infrastructure as code (IaC) templates (for example, AWS SAM templates, AWS CloudFormation templates)
- Managing environments in individual AWS services (for example, differentiating between development, test, and production in API Gateway)
Task Statement 4: Deploy code by using AWS CI/CD services.
Knowledge of:
- Git-based version control tools (for example, Git, AWS CodeCommit) (AWS Documentation: What is AWS CodeCommit?, Getting started with Git and AWS CodeCommit)
- Manual and automated approvals in AWS CodePipeline (AWS Documentation: Manage approval actions in CodePipeline)
- Access application configurations from AWS AppConfig and Secrets Manager (AWS Documentation: AWS AppConfig integration with AWS Secrets Manager)
- CI/CD workflows that use AWS services (AWS Documentation: CI/CD on AWS)
- Application deployment that uses AWS services and tools (for example, CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit [AWS CDK], AWS SAM, AWS CodeArtifact, Copilot, Amplify, Lambda)
- Lambda deployment packaging options (AWS Documentation: Lambda deployment packages)
- API Gateway stages and custom domains (AWS Documentation: Setting up custom domain names for REST APIs)
- Deployment strategies (for example, canary, blue/green, rolling) (AWS Documentation: Rolling Deployments)
Skills in:
- Updating existing IaC templates (for example, AWS SAM templates, CloudFormation templates)
- Managing application environments by using AWS services
- Deploying an application version by using deployment strategies
- Committing code to a repository to invoke build, test, and deployment actions
- Using orchestrated workflows to deploy code to different environments
- Performing application rollbacks by using existing deployment strategies
- Using labels and branches for version and release management
- Using existing runtime configurations to create dynamic deployments (for example, using staging variables from API Gateway in Lambda functions)
Domain 4: Troubleshooting and Optimization
Task Statement 1: Assist in a root cause analysis.
Knowledge of:
- Logging and monitoring systems (AWS Documentation: Designing and implementing logging and monitoring)
- Languages for log queries (for example, Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights) (AWS Documentation: CloudWatch Logs Insights query syntax, Analyzing log data with CloudWatch Logs Insights)
- Data visualizations (AWS Documentation: Data visualization)
- Code analysis tools
- Common HTTP error codes (AWS Documentation: Supported status codes for custom response, Common Errors)
- Common exceptions generated by SDKs (AWS Documentation: Exception handling for the AWS SDK for Java 2.x)
- Service maps in AWS X-Ray (AWS Documentation: Using the service map)
Skills in:
- Debugging code to identify defects
- Interpreting application metrics, logs, and traces
- Querying logs to find relevant data
- Implementing custom metrics (for example, CloudWatch embedded metric format [EMF])
- Reviewing application health by using dashboards and insights
- Troubleshooting deployment failures by using service output logs
Task Statement 2: Instrument code for observability.
Knowledge of:
- Distributed tracing (AWS Documentation: AWS X-Ray, What is AWS X-Ray?)
- Differences between logging, monitoring, and observability (AWS Documentation: Monitoring and observability)
- Structured logging (AWS Documentation: Centralized and structured logging)
- Application metrics (for example, custom, embedded, built-in) (AWS Documentation: Publishing custom metrics)
Skills in:
- Implementing an effective logging strategy to record application behavior and state
- Implementing code that emits custom metrics
- Adding annotations for tracing services
- Implementing notification alerts for specific actions (for example, notifications about quota
limits or deployment completions) - Implementing tracing by using AWS services and tools
Task Statement 3: Optimize applications by using AWS services and features.
Knowledge of:
- Caching
- Concurrency (AWS Documentation: Configuring reserved concurrency)
- Messaging services (for example, Amazon Simple Queue Service [Amazon SQS], Amazon Simple Notification Service [Amazon SNS]) (AWS Documentation: Fanout to Amazon SQS queues, Sending Amazon SNS messages to an Amazon SQS queue in a different account, What is Amazon Simple Queue Service?)
Skills in:
- Profiling application performance
- Determining minimum memory and compute power for an application
- Using subscription filter policies to optimize messaging
- Caching content based on request headers
For more information about the course outline, you can go to – AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C01)
Step 4 – Refer to AWS training
AWS Technical Essentials – The AWS Technical Essentials introductory course will teach you about AWS products, services, and common solutions. Furthermore, you will gain hands-on experience with the fundamentals of identifying AWS services. Moreover, This will enable you to make informed decisions about IT solutions based on your company’s needs.
Also, Developing on AWS is a three-day course designed by AWS for candidates wishing to take the AWS Developer Associate exam. This course is designed to teach candidates how to use the AWS SDK to create secure and scalable cloud applications.
Furthermore, Advanced Developing on AWS – AWS experts designed the Advanced Developing on AWS course to familiarize candidates with the real-world scenario of refactoring a legacy, on-premises monolithic application into a serverless microservices architecture. This advanced three-day course covers advanced development topics.
Step 5 – Practice tests for AWS Certified Developer Associate
Practice exams can help you figure out how long each question will take you to answer and how well you understand each topic. Furthermore, practice tests can help you focus on single-domain subjects, which is a good place to start when preparing for a test. However, once you’ve mastered the domain, begin taking full-length practice exams to hone your revision skills. Begin by taking an AWS Developer Associate practice test to better understand your strengths and weaknesses.
Step 6 – Whitepapers for AWS Certified Developer Associate
The AWS team provides several whitepapers to help you improve your technical knowledge. These whitepapers are solely the work of the AWS team, analysts, and other AWS partners. Here are some –
- Firstly, Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices
- Secondly, AWS Security Best Practices
- Thirdly, Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes
- Subsequently, AWS Well-Architected Framework
- Moreover, Development and Test on AWS
- Further, Backup and Recovery Approaches Using AWS
- Also, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Connectivity Options
Step 7 – Participate in Online Forums
When a large number of people are in a problem, the likelihood of finding a solution increases dramatically. Having different points of view also makes the material more lively. Also, As a result of these discussions in online forums, the research becomes more extensive. Introverts, who may normally avoid conversations, hold the opportunity to express themselves. Furthermore, Forums are excellent for building the community required for understanding others.
Some Additional Tricks
These are the topics that you should develop a clear understanding of when you start preparing for the exam –
- You must understand and practice all the different ways to manage AWS resources. Furthermore, You must have hands-on experience managing resources using the AWS management console, AWS CLI, and AWS SDK. Moreover, You may be asked API-related questions, such as what is the API action for learning about EC2 instances.
- AWS IAM and AWS Cognito are critical concepts, and you may be asked about IAM Roles, IAM Groups, Cross accounts, Cognito User pools, and Cognito Identity pools, among other things. The exam truly tests your understanding of the best practices for distributing AWS credentials to your code based on where it is running. You must understand how to identify valid IAM policies. AWS SSO, AWS STS, Amazon Cognito, and Amazon-managed Microsoft AD are all options.
- When it comes to computing and networking, you must understand the fundamentals of EC2, such as connecting to EC2, how EC2 communicates with other resources, familiarity with AMI in relation to launching an instance, the difference between persistent and ephemeral storage, how EC2 communicates with Amazon VPC, public and private subnets, security groups, and network ACLs, and what is your responsibility under the shared responsibility model.
- You must understand all of these concepts, including Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Kinesis services, Amazon DynamoDB Streams, AWS Internet of Things (IoT), Amazon Message Query (Amazon MQ), and AWS Step Functions, as well as how and when they are used.
- Furthermore, Learn about Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudTrail, AWS X-ray, and the distinction between high and standard resolution metrics. Make sure you understand why all of these things exist and how they are in use for monitoring.
Final Words
The cloud industry will expand rapidly in the coming years. Passing the AWS Developer Associate exam is the best way to improve your job stability and earn more money. As a result, if you want to improve your preparation, you must focus on all of the critical areas. Create a study plan, understand test patterns using the above information, and pass the exam with step-by-step preparation.
