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AWS Certified Developer – AssociateStudy guide

The associate certification for developing on AWS (DVA-C02).

Practice questions →Glossary →Knowledge map →

About AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02)

AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) is a Associate-level certification from AWS. This page organizes the exam scope into a 5-chapter, 15-section study guide and lets you check your understanding with exam-style practice questions. A good flow is to read the chapters below in order, then test yourself via "Practice questions."

Exam domains (approximate weighting)

  • Development with AWS Services~32%
  • Security~26%
  • Deployment~24%
  • Troubleshooting and Optimization~18%

Weights are approximate guidance for the live exam. Each domain is covered in detail in the chapters and sections below.

Official exam information: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-developer-associate/

1Development with AWS Services I: Serverless Core

  • 1.1AWS Lambda and Serverless

    Understand the basics of AWS Lambda (event-driven, no servers, billing model), handlers and the execution environment, memory/timeout, and cold starts. The core of "Development with AWS Services" in DVA-C02.

  • 1.2Exposing APIs with Amazon API Gateway

    Understand exposing APIs with API Gateway (routing, auth, throttling, stages, caching), REST/HTTP/WebSocket differences, and Lambda integration.

  • 1.3Working with Data in Amazon DynamoDB

    Understand DynamoDB tables and keys (partition/sort key), Query vs. Scan, and global secondary indexes (GSI)—the data layer for serverless apps.

2Application Integration and Event-Driven Design

3Security

  • 3.1IAM and Authorizing Applications

    Understand authorizing applications: temporary credentials via IAM roles (no embedded keys on Lambda/EC2), least-privilege policies, and assuming roles (AssumeRole). The core of "Security" in DVA-C02.

  • 3.2User Authentication with Amazon Cognito

    Understand Cognito user pools (sign-up/sign-in, JWT issuance) vs. identity pools (exchange tokens for temporary AWS credentials) and the app user-auth flow.

  • 3.3Encryption and Secrets (KMS, Secrets Manager)

    Understand key management and encryption at rest with AWS KMS, and securely storing/fetching/rotating secrets with Secrets Manager / SSM Parameter Store.

4Deployment

  • 4.1CI/CD Pipelines

    Understand CI/CD basics: automating source→build→test→deploy with CodePipeline, the roles of CodeBuild (build/test) and CodeDeploy (deploy), and buildspec. The core of "Deployment" in DVA-C02.

  • 4.2IaC: CloudFormation and SAM

    Understand declarative infrastructure with CloudFormation (stacks, templates), the serverless shorthand AWS SAM, and the benefits of repeatable deployments.

  • 4.3Deployment Strategies and Elastic Beanstalk

    Understand deployment-strategy trade-offs (all-at-once/rolling/blue-green/canary; speed vs. safety/rollback) and the PaaS Elastic Beanstalk.

5Troubleshooting and Optimization

  • 5.1Observability with CloudWatch

    Understand observability basics: CloudWatch Logs / Logs Insights, metrics and alarms, and custom metrics. The starting point for "Troubleshooting and Optimization" in DVA-C02.

  • 5.2Distributed Tracing and Debugging with X-Ray

    Understand debugging with AWS X-Ray: distributed tracing (request path and per-segment latency), pinpointing bottlenecks/errors, and the service map.

  • 5.3Optimizing Performance and Cost

    Understand optimization: caching (ElastiCache/DAX/CloudFront), Lambda tuning (memory/concurrency/cold-start mitigation), and efficient data access (Query, retries with exponential backoff, pagination).