Amazon Web Services
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 — study time should roughly follow it.
DVA-C02AssociateIntermediate
1. Development with AWS Services
32%- Writing against service APIs with the AWS SDKs — retries, pagination, idempotency
- Event-driven and serverless patterns: Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions
- DynamoDB data modelling — partition and sort keys, indexes, and the access patterns they serve
- S3 in application code: presigned URLs, multipart upload, event notifications
2. Security
26%- IAM from inside the application — execution roles, assumed roles, and why long-lived keys are the wrong answer
- Managing secrets and configuration with Secrets Manager and Parameter Store, including rotation
- Encryption with KMS: envelope encryption, key policies, and client- versus server-side choices
- Authenticating end users with Amazon Cognito — user pools versus identity pools
3. Deployment
24%- CI/CD with CodePipeline, CodeBuild and CodeDeploy, and what each stage owns
- Deployment strategies — in-place, blue/green, canary, linear — and their rollback behaviour
- Infrastructure as code with CloudFormation and SAM, including change sets
- Lambda versions, aliases and traffic shifting for safe releases
4. Troubleshooting and Optimization
18%- Reading CloudWatch logs, metrics and alarms back to a root cause
- Distributed tracing with X-Ray across service boundaries
- Diagnosing throttling, timeouts and cold starts — and the different fixes each needs
- Caching and performance tuning: DAX, ElastiCache, API Gateway caching, Lambda memory sizing
Our practice exam distributes its questions across these exact domains at these weightings — so your score per domain tells you precisely where you stand.
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