Amazon Web Services · DVA-C02 · Associate · Intermediate
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) exam objectives
Amazon Web Services publishes 4 exam domains with official weightings. The weight tells you where your marks come from, so your study time should roughly follow it.
1. Development with AWS Services
32%- Write against service APIs with the AWS SDKs: retries, pagination, idempotency
- Build event-driven and serverless flows with Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, EventBridge and Step Functions
- Model DynamoDB tables around access patterns, using partition keys, sort keys and indexes
- Use S3 from application code: presigned URLs, multipart upload, event notifications
2. Security
26%- Use IAM from inside the application: execution roles and assumed roles, never long-lived keys
- Store secrets and configuration in Secrets Manager and Parameter Store, and rotate them
- Encrypt with KMS: envelope encryption, key policies, and client-side versus server-side choices
- Authenticate end users with Amazon Cognito, and tell user pools apart from identity pools
3. Deployment
24%- Run CI/CD with CodePipeline, CodeBuild and CodeDeploy, and know what each stage owns
- Compare deployment strategies (in-place, blue/green, canary, linear) and their rollback behaviour
- Define infrastructure as code with CloudFormation and SAM, including change sets
- Ship safely with Lambda versions, aliases and traffic shifting
4. Troubleshooting and Optimization
18%- Read CloudWatch logs, metrics and alarms back to a root cause
- Trace requests across service boundaries with X-Ray
- Tell throttling, timeouts and cold starts apart. Each one needs a different fix
- Tune performance with DAX, ElastiCache, API Gateway caching and Lambda memory sizing
Our practice exam spreads its questions across these exact domains at these weightings, so your score in each one tells you precisely where you stand.
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