The AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) exam is for people who build applications on AWS. Where the Solutions Architect exam asks "how should this system be designed?", the Developer exam asks "how do you implement, secure, deploy and debug it?". It leans heavily on serverless services, the AWS SDK and CI/CD.
The exam in brief
- 65 multiple choice and multiple response questions (some unscored), 130 minutes.
- Passing score: 720 out of 1000.
- Always check the current exam guide for the official domain weights and in-scope services.
The four domains
| Domain | Focus |
|---|---|
| Development with AWS Services | Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, SQS/SNS/EventBridge, Step Functions, SDK usage, caching |
| Security | IAM roles and policies, Cognito, KMS and encryption, Secrets Manager and Parameter Store |
| Deployment | SAM, CloudFormation, CodeCommit/CodeBuild/CodeDeploy/CodePipeline, Lambda versions and aliases, Elastic Beanstalk, containers |
| Troubleshooting and Optimization | CloudWatch logs and metrics, X-Ray, performance tuning, error handling and retries |
Development is the largest domain, so serverless fluency pays off most.
High-yield topics
Lambda
- Sync vs async vs event source mapping invocations, retries, destinations and DLQs.
- Memory/CPU, timeout, concurrency (reserved and provisioned), cold starts.
- Environment variables, layers, container images,
/tmp. - Versions (immutable) and aliases (pointers), weighted alias traffic for canaries.
DynamoDB
- Partition and sort keys, Query vs Scan, GSIs vs LSIs, projections.
- Calculating RCUs and WCUs (strongly vs eventually consistent, item size rounding).
- Conditional writes, optimistic locking with version attributes, transactions, TTL, Streams, DAX.
- Error handling:
ProvisionedThroughputExceededExceptionand exponential backoff.
API Gateway
- REST vs HTTP APIs, stages and stage variables, deployments, usage plans and API keys, caching, CORS, Lambda proxy integration response format.
Security for developers
- Never put credentials in code: use roles; the SDK's default credential provider chain finds them.
- Cognito user pools (authentication, JWTs) vs identity pools (temporary AWS credentials).
- KMS envelope encryption,
GenerateDataKey, encryption context; Secrets Manager rotation vs Parameter Store SecureString. - S3 presigned URLs for temporary uploads and downloads.
Deployment
- SAM template basics (
AWS::Serverless::Function),sam build/sam deploy, and gradual deployments with alarms. - CodeDeploy deployment configurations for Lambda (canary, linear, all-at-once) and EC2/ECS, plus
appspechooks. - Elastic Beanstalk deployment policies: all at once, rolling, rolling with additional batch, immutable, traffic splitting, blue/green via environment swap.
Troubleshooting
- X-Ray: segments, subsegments, annotations (indexed, searchable) vs metadata (not indexed), sampling rules.
- CloudWatch Logs Insights, embedded metric format, custom metrics.
- HTTP status codes from API Gateway and what they mean (403, 429, 502, 504).
A six-week plan
- Week 1: IAM for developers, SDK credentials, S3 (presigned URLs, events, encryption).
- Week 2: Lambda deeply: build, deploy, tune, handle errors.
- Week 3: API Gateway and Cognito: build an authenticated API.
- Week 4: DynamoDB modeling, capacity math, streams; SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions.
- Week 5: SAM, CloudFormation, CodePipeline/CodeBuild/CodeDeploy, versions and aliases.
- Week 6: X-Ray, CloudWatch, KMS and Secrets Manager; practice exams and review every mistake.
Practice the way the exam thinks
The DVA-C02 is full of scenarios like "a Lambda function processing SQS messages times out and messages are processed twice: what should the developer change?". These are much easier if you have seen them happen. Cloud Arena's AWS Certified Developer – Associate path covers the exam's services with real AWS labs, including Lambda Tuning with an SQS DLQ, DynamoDB Data Access, Cognito and API Gateway Authorizer, Secrets Manager, Parameter Store and Lambda Env Vars and AWS X-Ray Active Tracing.
FAQ
Do I need to write code in the exam?
No, but you will read snippets, CLI commands, IAM policies and templates, and pick what is correct.
Developer or Solutions Architect Associate first?
If you write application code, the Developer exam often feels more natural. Many people take both; the overlap (IAM, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda) is large.