The AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) exam is designed for developers working with AWS. This exam assesses their skills in developing, testing, deploying, and debugging AWS cloud-based applications. It covers topics such as application development, security, deployment, troubleshooting, and optimization.
Target candidates should have at least one year of hands-on experience with AWS application development. They should be proficient in high-level programming languages, understand application lifecycle management, and have a basic knowledge of cloud-native applications.
The exam contains both multiple-choice and multiple-response questions. A passing score is 720 out of 1000, and the exam is divided into four domains:
- Development with AWS Services (32% of the exam)
- Developing code for AWS-hosted applications
- Developing code for AWS Lambda
- Using data stores in application development
- Security (26% of the exam)
- Implementing authentication and authorization
- Implementing encryption with AWS services
- Managing sensitive data in application code
- Deployment (24% of the exam)
- Preparing application artifacts for deployment
- Testing applications in development environments
- Automating deployment testing
- Deploying code using AWS CI/CD services
- Troubleshooting and Optimization (18% of the exam)
- Assisting in root cause analysis
- Instrumenting code for observability
- Optimizing applications using AWS services and features
The exam includes unscored questions to evaluate for future use. Unanswered questions are considered incorrect. Your overall score determines if you pass or fail the exam, with different domains weighted accordingly.
Difficulty: 1 out of 5.
I found this to be a fun little trip into the world of AWS. Whereas AWS: SAA is about stacking together blocks in a block diagram to get a system-level result, AWS Developer Associate is about how the inside of those little blocks work. The exam itself took me about 2 weeks to prepare for and gave me a pretty good grounding in AWS. I did not significantly work with AWS prior to studying but after knocking out AWS: SAA and AWS: DA I felt like I could do most basic tasks. I could even talk to my future AWS team somewhat competently!
If you think you're going to work on AWS, I'd recommend doing this one.
