AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) study guide

How to use this guide

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Common mistakes

• ✕Reaching for access keys in application code. The exam's expected answer is almost always an IAM role — hardcoded or environment-variable credentials are there as the wrong option.
• ✕Modelling DynamoDB like a relational table. Questions are built around access patterns, and a design that needs a scan is usually the one being marked wrong.
• ✕Blurring the CodePipeline family: CodeBuild compiles and tests, CodeDeploy releases, CodePipeline orchestrates. Questions turn on which one owns the failing step.
• ✕Confusing Lambda versions with aliases, then getting traffic-shifting and rollback questions wrong.
• ✕Treating every latency symptom as a cold start. Throttling, undersized memory and downstream timeouts present similarly and have different fixes.
• ✕Ignoring Step Functions. Long-running or multi-step orchestration is a recurring scenario where chained Lambdas is the trap answer.

Exam-day tips

• ✓Scoring is compensatory — a weak domain cannot fail you alone. Answer everything.
• ✓There is no penalty for guessing. Never leave a question blank.
• ✓Multiple-response questions state how many to select. Count them and pick exactly that many.
• ✓In security questions, eliminate anything using static credentials first — it removes an option almost every time.
• ✓Read code snippets for the one line that differs between options rather than tracing the whole thing.
• ✓At 65 questions in 130 minutes you have two minutes each. Flag long snippet questions and return to them.

How to know you’re ready

One good practice score can be luck. The signal that holds up: consistently at or above the real pass mark (720 on a 100–1000 scaled score) across multiple full-length sets, with no single domain dragging far below the rest. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.