AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Learning Path

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AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Learning Path
AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Summary
AWS Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Resources
AWS Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Topics
AWS Cloud Computing Whitepapers
AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Contents

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 exam is the latest AWS exam and would replace the old Developer – Associate exam. It basically validates

  • Demonstrate an understanding of core AWS services, uses, and basic AWS architecture best practices.
  • Demonstrate proficiency in developing, deploying, and debugging cloud-based applications using AWS.

Refer AWS Certified Developer – Associate (Released June 2018) Exam Blue Print

AWS Certified Developer - Associate June 2018 Domains

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Summary

  • AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 exam is quite different from the previous one with more focus on the hands-on development and deployment concepts rather then just the architectural concepts
  • AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 exam covers a lot of latest AWS services like Lambda, X-Ray while focusing majorly on other services like DynamoDB, Elastic Beanstalk, S3, EC2

AWS Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Resources

AWS Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Topics

  • Be sure to cover the following topics
    • Compute
      • Understand what AWS services you can use to build a serverless architecture?
      • Make sure you know and understand Lambda and serverless architecture, its features and use cases.
      • Know Lambda limits for e.g. execution time, deployable zipped and unzipped package limit
      • Be sure to know how to deploy, package using Lambda.
      • Understand tracing of Lambda functions using X-Ray
      • Understand integration of Lambda with CloudWatch.
      • Understand how to handle multiple releases using Alias
      • Know AWS Step Functions to manage Lambda functions flow
      • Understand Lambda with API Gateway
      • Understand API Gateway stages, ability to cater to different environments for e.g. dev, test, prod
      • Understand EC2 as a whole
      • Understand EC2 Metadata & Userdata. Whats the use of each? How to look up instance data after it is launched.
      • Understand EC2 Security. How IAM Role work with EC2 instances.
      • Understand how does EC2 evaluates the order of credentials, when multiple are provided. Remember the order – Environment variables -> Java system properties -> Default credential profiles file -> ECS container credentials -> Instance Profile credentials
      • Know Elastic Beanstalk at a high level, what it provides and its ability to get an application running quickly
      • Understand Elastic Beanstalk configurations and deployment types with their advantages and disadvantages
    • Databases
      • Understand relational and NoSQLs data storage options which include RDS, DynamoDB and their use cases
      • Understand DynamoDB Secondary Indexes
      • Make sure you understand DynamoDB provisioned throughput for Read/Writes and its calculations
      • Make sure you understand DynamoDB Consistency Model – difference between Strongly Consistent and Eventual Consistency
      • Understand DynamoDB with its low latency performance, DAX
      • Know how to configure fine grained security for DynamoDB table, items, attributes
      • Understand DynamoDB Best Practices regarding
        • table design
        • provisioned throughput
        • Query vs Scan operations
        • improving Scan operation performance
      • Understand RDS features – Read Replicas for scalability, Multi-AZ for High Availability
      • Know ElastiCache use cases, mainly for caching performance
      • Understand ElastiCache Redis vs Memcached
    • Storage
      • Understand S3 storage option
      • Understand S3 Best Practices to improve performance for GET/PUT requests
      • Understand S3 features like different storage classes with lifecycle policies, static website hosting, versioning, Pre-Signed URLs for both upload and download, CORS
    • Security
      • Understand IAM as a whole
      • Focus on IAM role and its use case especially with EC2 instance
      • Know how to test and validate IAM policies
      • Understand IAM identity providers and federation and use cases
      • Understand how AWS Cognito works and what features it provides
      • Understand MFA and How would implement two factor authentication for your application
      • Understand KMS for key management and envelope encryption
      • Know what services support KMS
        • Remember SQS, Kinesis now provides SSE support
      • Focus on S3 with SSE, SSE-C, SSE-KMS. How they work and differ?
      • Know how can you enforce only buckets to only accept encrypted objects
      • Know various KMS encryption options encrypt, reencrypt, generateEncryptedDataKey etc
      • Know how KMS impacts the performance of the services
    • Management Tools
      • Understand CloudWatch monitoring to provide operational transparency
      • Know which EC2 metrics it can track.
      • Understand CloudWatch is extendable with custom metrics
      • Understand CloudTrail for Audit
    • Integration Tools
      • Understand SQS as message queuing service and SNS as pub/sub notification service
      • Understand SQS features like visibility, long poll vs short poll
      • Focus on SQS as a decoupling service
      • AWS has released SQS FIFO, make sure you know the differences between standard and FIFO
      • Know the different development and deployment tools like CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline
    • Networking
      • Does not cover much on networking or designing of networks, but be sure you understand VPC, Subnets, Routes, Security Groups etc.

AWS Cloud Computing Whitepapers

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Contents

Domain 1: Deployment

  1. Deploy written code in AWS using existing CI/CD pipelines, processes, and patterns.
  1. Deploy applications using Elastic Beanstalk.
  1. Prepare the application deployment package to be deployed to AWS.
  2. Deploy serverless applications.

Domain 2: Security

  1. Make authenticated calls to AWS services.
  1. Implement encryption using AWS services.
  2. Implement application authentication and authorization.

Domain 3: Development with AWS Services

  1. Write code for serverless applications.
  1. Translate functional requirements into application design.
  1. Implement application design into application code.
  2. Write code that interacts with AWS services by using APIs, SDKs, and AWS CLI.

Domain 4: Refactoring

  1. Optimize application to best use AWS services and features.
  2. Migrate existing application code to run on AWS.

Domain 5: Monitoring and Troubleshooting

  1. Write code that can be monitored.
  2. Perform root cause analysis on faults found in testing or production.

50 thoughts on “AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Learning Path”

  3. Can you please suggest me which exam can I take, I’m a fresher in Tech and looking forward for DevOps. Which will be more resourceful without overwhelming on my part. Thank you!

  4. Planning to take the AWS CDA June 2018 exam this month. Could you please suggest a good practice test i can take before appearing for the main exam.

  7. Hi Jaydenra Sir,

    Can you please add contents for the services related to Developer Tools?

    Thanks,
    Krutik

  8. Congratulations for this wonderful blog. It’s very helpful and a detailed one covering all aspects of the exam. I am planning for Aws Solution Architect Associate Exam.Any one online course you would suggest to clear the exam. I already have Linux Academy subscription. Thanks. Regards, Onima

    1. Linux academy should be good to cover the topics. Be sure to go through all the topics mentioned in the blogs. Also recommended practicing braincert exams.

  9. Hi Jayendra,

    Could you please let me know how different is New format of exam from the previous one and also could any one share some questions as we have it for the previous version of developer associate.

    Thanks

    1. Hi Vinod, the new developer exam is more developer focused on development tools, processes and deployment of applications which was never covered in the old exam. The old one had a lot of overlap with CSA exam which has changed.

  11. Hey Jayendra. I just passed SAA. Do you recommend Developer associate or SysOps next.
    I do have programming or developer knowledge but eventually would like to go into DevOps.

    1. There is no pre-requisites for professional. So if you want DevOps to be your path, you can target directly DevOps professional.

  12. Please give me your answer to the question below:

    A Developer is writing an application that will run on EC2 instances and read messages from
    an SQS queue. How should the Developer efficiently query the queue for new messages?

    A. Use long polling
    B. Set a custom visibility timeout
    C. Use short polling
    D. Implement exponential backoff.

  13. Hi Jayendra, I’m planning to write the Developer Associate exam in June,2019. Please suggest a good practice test set for the same.

    1. the practice listed on the learning path are quite good and have good user feedback.

  14. Dear Jayendra,

    Please kindly give me the answer to the 3 questions of DVA-C01 below:

    1) In aws, what is a way to identify unique users who are connecting from multiple devices (tablets, mobile, laptops, etc.). Can you do it through arn id, or iam user id. We don’t want to double count, someone signing on with a tablet and also signing up with mobile should be counted once. How can this be done?

    2) why is it that when a lambda function fails when processing an empty field in dynamodb that it can result in a duplication for the lambda function but in kinesis we do not see the duplicates in the stream

    3) suppose you split the shards to handle the data size and increase the number of shards from 4 to 6, initially we were using let say 4 ec2 instances, what’s the number of ec2 instances we need to run consuming the shards from kinesis?
    A.12
    B.6
    C.5
    D.4
    E.1

    1. not sure for 1 & 2 without much context. For #3 you can only have consumers equal to or less than shards, so max it can go is 6

  15. I took the Developer Assoc exam today (Jun 17) and passed the exam. Waiting for the scores..
    It took about a month to prepare for this certification (I already have Architect assoc certification from Dec 2018. So i did not have to start from scratch for this exam. But this test is totally different Architect exam. You need 1-2 months to be fully prepared.
    My recommendation :
    #Stephane Maarek – Udemy Ultimate AWS Developer Assoc – 2019 course — this is very useful. Helps a lot (just 9.99 if you use coupon from Jayendrapatil)
    #I would recommend braincert practice tests – 6 tests for 19.99 . worth it.
    #Also buy Stephane Maarek’s 4 practice tests from Udemy. They are just 9.99

    That’s all you need .
    Don’t read too much on Network/Subnet/NACL/IGW/VGW/VPC etc.. Developer certification does not ask any of those. Its all about Lambda/API Gateway/Security Keys/X-ray/Cloudformation/DynamoDB/Serverless/

    Good Luck!

  16. I passed the exam.
    Time costs to learning – 120 hours, 10 hours a week for three months.
    Instruments – QwikLabs for practice classes, and test exams from Braincert and Whizlabs.

  17. Hi Jayendra,

    I am a fresher from JAVA background. I would like to enter into Cloud World through AWS. Could you please suggest me the path and the things which I need to follow to learn AWS?

    1. Hi Mukka,

      I would suggest start using AWS Digital Training videos to get started. They are free and you can use free tier to try out things.
      Inline, start preparing with one of the exams either SA or Developer, so you can speed and get an idea of the the Cloud and AWS Services.

  18. Hi Jayendra,

    Hope you are doing well.

    Just wanted to confirm that Is this developer syllabus is as per the new developer associate exam??

  19. Dear Jayendra,

    I have completed solution architect- associate and professional. Can you suggest me what is next in the path. Is dev ops recommended?

    Thanks

    1. Hi Peter,

      It must be what you want to learn and apply. DevOps is great if you want to deal with infrastructure and automation. Else feel free to pick up the speciality ones.

      Regards,

  20. Dear Jayendra,

    I am planning to take up AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam, couple of months. I would like to know the number of questions, duration and also the pass percentage. Please let me know details on the same.

    Regards,
    Raj

  21. I am interested in devops. Can I get directly into Devops professional? How is it different from associate? Could u share the learning path for devops professional?

  22. Hi senior,
    thanks for your previous responce comment to all i got so many clarification now i understand what is AWS.
    give me story,
    how we set strong mind set at before going to AWS DEV certified course.

    1. Make sure you get your concepts right and practice with hands on as well. Make use of the resources listed.

  23. Hello sir, I got videos of one course of Ryan(I think 2018) and another course of Stephane (2019) shared to me by someone. I can pass by reading these two courses and purchasing some practice exame? My question is how often these course vedio is updates ? In course they keep saying many new service added everyday.

    1. Depends on the instructor, how often they update the videos to include new content. But also AWS exams do not really change every day so unless AWS releases a different version, you should be good to practice with the videos and practice exams.

  25. hello sir,

    I have gone through the your blogs, links, path and many stuffs now. I want to pass in the first attempt with flying color. But still I am not confident enough.

    What would that be, that would give me a confidence boost at this stage.

    Thanks
    SSRao

    1. Would recommend you take practice tests mentioned in the resources, that can really help your ability to think quickly and gain confidence.

  27. Hi Jayendra,
    Has the exam syllabus changed since the last time you updated this blog? If so what are the revisions in the syllabus?

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