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

How to use this guide

What to focus on:

• 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

What to focus on:

• 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

What to focus on:

• 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

What to focus on:

• 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

Common mistakes

• ✕Reaching for access keys in application code. The 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 look similar and have different fixes.
• ✕Ignoring Step Functions. Long-running or multi-step orchestration comes up often, and chained Lambdas is the trap answer.

Exam-day tips

• ✓Answer every question. Scoring is compensatory, so one weak domain cannot fail you on its own.
• ✓Never leave a question blank. There is no penalty for guessing.
• ✓Count the selections asked for. Multiple-response questions say how many to pick, so pick exactly that many.
• ✓Eliminate static credentials first in security questions. It rules out an option almost every time.
• ✓Scan code snippets for the one line that differs between options instead of tracing the whole thing.
• ✓Budget two minutes per question: 65 questions in 130 minutes. Flag long snippet questions and return to them.

How to know you’re ready

One good practice score can be luck. What counts is scoring at or above the real pass mark (720 on a 100 to 1000 scaled score) across several full-length sets in a row, with no single domain trailing far behind the others. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.