AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 exam was the AWS exam version available from June 2018 to February 2023 and has been replaced by the DVA-C02 exam. It validated:

• 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 DVA-C01 Summary

• AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 exam was quite different from the previous one with more focus on the hands-on development and deployment concepts rather than just the architectural concepts
• AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 exam covered a lot of AWS services like Lambda, X-Ray while focusing majorly on other services like DynamoDB, Elastic Beanstalk, S3, EC2
• Note: DVA-C01 was retired on Feb 27, 2023. For current exam preparation, refer to the DVA-C02 Learning Path

AWS Developer – Associate Exam Resources (Updated for DVA-C02)

• Online courses
  • Stephane Maarek – Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate DVA-C02
• Practice tests
  • Braincert AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 Practice Exams
  • Stephane Maarek – AWS Certified Developer – Associate Practice Exams
• Signed up with AWS for the Free Tier account which provides a lot of Services to be tried for free with certain limits which are more than enough to get things going. Be sure to decommission anything, if you using anything beyond the free limits, preventing any surprises 🙂
• Read the FAQs at least for the important topics, as they cover important points and are good for quick review

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

• Architecting for the AWS Cloud: Best Practices
• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• AWS Security Best Practices whitepaper
• Practicing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery on AWS
• Microservices on AWS whitepaper
• Serverless Architectures with AWS Lambda whitepaper
• Optimizing Enterprise Economics with Serverless Architectures whitepaper
• Running Containerized Microservices on AWS whitepaper
• Blue/Green Deployments on AWS whitepaper

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C01 Exam Contents

Note: These domains are specific to the retired DVA-C01 exam. The current DVA-C02 exam has different domain structure and weightings. See the DVA-C02 Learning Path for current exam domains.

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.

DVA-C01 vs DVA-C02 — Key Differences

If you studied for DVA-C01 and need to understand what changed for DVA-C02:

• Domain restructuring: DVA-C01 had 5 domains; DVA-C02 has 4 domains with different weightings
• Refactoring domain removed: Merged into Development and Troubleshooting domains
• More Lambda focus: Lambda gets its own dedicated task in DVA-C02
• CI/CD emphasis: Greater focus on CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CDK
• New services added: EventBridge, AppSync, Step Functions, CDK, Amazon Q Developer
• Services de-emphasized: Less focus on Elastic Beanstalk, more on containers (ECS/EKS)
• Security weight increased: Security is now 26% of the exam (was 12% in DVA-C01)
• AI-assisted development: December 2024 revision added Amazon Q Developer skills

For full DVA-C02 preparation guidance, visit the AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 Exam Learning Path.