AWS Certified Developer – Associate: My Exam Experience

Hey folks, what’s up?

Yesterday I did the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam after my old one expired and with that, it’s officially open my journey to get the AWS golden jacket. This was never a real goal, but as we’ve already come a third of the way, having acquired 4 of the 12 certifications available, I think it’s worth a try.

It means that you’ll find a serie of posts related to AWS certifications over the coming months. I’ll try not to be repetitive and just tell a bit about my experience during the exam and summarize what I believe that is essential knowledge to do well in the exam.

The AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam

I took the exam online, at home, and it took me about 50 minutes to complete it. With a total of 65 questions, the score needed to pass the exam was 720 and I scored 800🏅

In general, it’s a very straightforward exam, where the questions are short (2-3 lines in most of the cases) and focus on understanding whether you know the correct featured to solve the problems presented.

Although it’s an exam for developers, I didn’t have any questions that involved code, for example using the CDK or Boto3; the closest I got were questions with CloudFormation code and AWS CLI commands.

Based on my experience, beyond the basic knowledge on the AWS Resources, you must be comfortable with:

Lambda:

• How to use ALIAS and VERSIONS and how it can help you during the deployment and test of new versions of code.
• How to increase resources of a Lambda function. And there is a tricky scenario here to be aware, as you cannot increase directly CPU.
• The requirements for running inside a VPC such as IAM policies, Security Group rules, etc.
• Encryption applied to environment variables
• AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS::Serverless::Function) and dependencies

DynamoDB:

• Differences between Global Secondary Indexes (GSI) and Local Secondary Indexes (LSI)
• Best practices of Primary Key and Sort Key
• When you must use Parallel Scans or Full Scans
• Query vs Table Scan vs GetItem vs GetItemBatch
• Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)

API Gateway:

• Proxy integration with Lambda
• How to configure CORS
• Using API Caching to improve performance
• Canary Release Deployment
• Using stage variables for multi-environment APIs

Deployment:

• Differences between Blue-Green, Canary and RollingUpdate
• How to override the buildspec.yml file on AWS Code Build using AWS CLI
• Best practices applied to buildspec.yml
• Feature Flag with AWS App Config
• Configuring and customizing Elastic Beanstalk using .ebextensions folder
• The walking deads CodeStar and CodeCommit

IAM & Identity:

• Allowing resource communication using IAM roles
• Using AWS Cognito as Identity Provider
• Differences between AWS Cognito User Pool and AWS Cognito Identity Pool
• S3 policies

Other topics:

• X-Ray traces filters and configuration.
• CloudFormation in general
• ECS task definition configuration
• ECR features beyond container registry (cache repository, vulnerability scans, etc)
• Differences between Kinesis Data Firehose and Kinesis Data Stream
• Storing and consuming secrets and parameters securely with Parameter Store and Secrets Manager

Remembering that these are the most specific topics I can think of, if you want to know everything that is covered in the exam, you should read the Exam Guide, available on the official certification page: AWS Certified Developer – Associate.

Bonus: Don’t know what the AWS Golden Jacket is?

It’s a prize for those who manage to pass all 12 certification exams available and keep all the badges active at the same time. It’s quite a challenge since the certifications cover several IT areas in detail and require in-depth knowledge in all of them, but we’re going for it!

If you have any questions related to the exam, please, let me know.