Passing the AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam

7 min readFeb 2, 2021

As described in my initial post, I recently decided to get AWS certified. So far, I have successfully cleared the Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect exams. Thus, there are still two Associate level exams left to finish: The Developer and SysOps Administrator certificates. By learning for and passing both I will (hopefully) have built a solid foundation for the Professional level exams later on.

The first question that pooped up: in what order to sit the two exams? I feel comfortable in both areas, as I actually develop Java backend applications and do sysops work on a daily basis. Thus to decide this, I took a look in the sample exam questions and exam guides for both. I thought the developer exam was a little more difficult. Mainly due to the fact that I was not really familiar with things like Lambda and Cognito. Consequently, I started to prepare myself for the Developer certificate first, as there were more new concepts to learn.

Exam Blueprint

The AWS Developer Associate exam (AWS DVA-C01) is Multiple Choice/Multiple Answer. The questions are scenario based. Have a look at the official example questions from AWS to get an idea what is expected of you in the exam.

As described in the official exam guide here are the facts:

65 Multiple Choice/Multiple Response questions
Exam Duration: 130 minutes
Passing Score: 720 of 1000 points
Valid for 3 years
Cost: $150 (or 75$ if you already passed another AWS exam and still have the 50% voucher)
You can take an ungraded practice exam for $20
Testing is done via PSI or Pearson VUE (either in a test center or online)

Preparation

As with the other two exams, I started by going through the corresponding ACloudGuru course. This took me a little less than two weeks (5th to 15th of January) or 60 hours. As always, mostly due to my habbit of taking extensive notes during the sessions.

In my post on the Solutions Architect, I wrote that I was not satisfied with the overall exam results. Therefore, I added two other tools to my exam preparation arsenal.

The first one was to use the section tests provided by Whizlabs. In my opinion they were more difficult compared to the ACloudGuru ones, as they require a more detailed level of understanding. However, this is something the actual exam also requires of you. Taking them after clearing the corresponding ACloudGuru sections really helped me solidifying my understanding of the various topics. Especially around API Gateway, which my exam heavily focused on.

The second thing I changed was to add the practice exams from TutorialsDojo. They offer the same overall level as the Whizlabs ones but are different. So I got more practice and could check whether or not I actually understood the concepts (or had just memorized the answers).

Thus, my routine consisted of:

Going through the ACloudGuru course and Whizlab section tests in parallel.
After I finished the curriculum, I started to work my way first through all Whizlab practice exams and finally through all TutorialDojo ones.
Reading the suggested Whitepapers and FAQs besides all of this

Going through all of this took me around 90 hours in preparation time for the exam. 60 hours for the course plus readings and 30 for the practice exams. And again, it was worth it, and I booked the exam for the 20th of January. Eager to find out if the extra effort payed out.

Resources

To our benefit AWS and third-party vendors provide a ton of resources. Here are the ones I used and mentioned above.

AWS Developer Exam Webpage

This is the first stop you should make. AWS will give you a lot of info and learning material for free. You get the current exam blueprint, exam guide, and some sample questions, as I already mentioned above.

ACloudGuru Developer Course

The course covers the exam topics. However, as with the Solutions Architect Course, it alone is not enough if you want to pass the exam. It has been extended recently and covers more ground. However, in my opinion it is still to shallow. It is a good overview with the occasional deep-dive. Thus, you still need to dive deep into the docs and FAQs, wherever necessary.

One thing which stuck with me in particular is the often heard claim that you only need to understand something on a high-level. Well, in my experience this is not true for most of the topics covered in the course. The exam expects you to know details on all of them. Just look at the official exam sample questions (for API Gateway, you actually need to have a grasp of details like signature versions).

To be fair, ACloudGuru seems to be aware this. They offer learning paths for Architects and Developers. Those include more than just the exam prep courses. And also deep-dive courses on selected topics.

Whitepapers

AWS has lots and lots of Whitepapers to describe their infrastructure, services, best-practices et cetera.
For the Developer Associate they recommend you to basically read the core ones about Developement and Deployment strategies:

Moreover, I recommend these two:

As with the other exams, I stay to my point that reading all those is useful for the exam. AWS published them and recommends reading them for a reason.

AWS FAQs

Besides the Whitepapers, AWS recommends you read these prior to the exam. I did this after taking the ACloudGuru course and in parallel to the practice exams. After I became familiar with the exam contents, reading the FAQS was a good way to solidify my knowledge and to rehearse the topics:

And even if you do not like reading them all, just again compare those to the example questions from AWS. The API Gateway FAQ actually talks about how AWS Signature Version 4 works. Sounds familiar?

Whizlabs Section Tests and Practice Exam

As I wrote above, I used the section tests in parallel to the ACloudGuru course and worked through the Whizlabs Practice Exams after the course. Both helped me find knowledge gaps and get deeper into the various topics. The explanations to the answers are valueable resources and provide links to AWS documentation. This will save you time.

Expect to be frustrated at first, as they are definitly harder than the ACloudGuru ones. However, they are the same level as the acutal exam. You should be able to score about 90% in the practice exams. If you can do this, move on to Tutorials Dojo.

Tutorials Dojo Practice Exams

The practice exams on Tutorials Dojo are on the same difficulty level as those from Whizlabs.

I have the problem of being able to easily remember the correct answers after doing those tests twice (in a span of several days) without even reading most of the question. To a learning experience this is counter-productive. So, here I get a brand new set of questions I actually need to read and think about. And as with Whizlabs, we get in-depth explanations and links for further reading to each and every question.

As with Whizlabs, you should be able to score about 90% in the practice exams and understand all the questions and answers. If so, you are ready to schedule the actual exam with AWS.

AWS Podcast

This is another great resource you can tap into. If you are into podcasts you can learn quite a bit from these. And you can easily listen to them while driving or going for a walk.

Before Testing

As mentioned here you can get 30 minutes extra time, if English is not your native language. This can easily be done through the AWS Certification Website. You can find more details here.
And you need to have this approved by AWS before you can book the exam or the extra time will not be added.

Exam

Like the other exams, I used PSI with online proctoring variante. And again, it worked really well.

You can start the exam process 30 minutes before the scheduled time and should do so. It can take some time until a proctor is ready for you.

It took me about 70 minutes to finish the exam, including checking on the flagged questions one more time. You get a PASSED/FAILED feedback right after finishing the exam. Do not stand up before seeing this, your exam is still running until then.

Detailed feedback with the score you achieved will be available to you in at most five days. Mine took about 24 hours to show up on the AWS Certification website.

Outcome

My change in the preparation routine payed off. I passed with a score of 947.

The difficulty level was again higher than with the AWS sample questions but on par with the ones from Whizlabs and Tutorials Dojo.

As usual some of the questions surprised me, despite all the preparation. Some in a good way — I got two questions basically alike to each other. So AWS really randomly drafts from their questions pool.

I would have felt more comfortable, if I had spend some extra time preparing these topics:

API Gateway, as about 25% of all questions focused on it. And as I had written above, the exam will be asking specifics. So digging in on the API Gateway Documentation would have been worth it
CloudFormation, especially to know about Pseudo-Variables and important intrinsic functions (e.g Fn::Ref, Fn::FindInMap, Fn::GetAtt …)
Knowing the defaults settings for a variety of services. Things like Lambda timeouts and memory settings, or to know which service is encrypted by default and which is not

That’s it, I hope you enjoyed my summary. And in case you also decide to go down the AWS certification road: Good Luck with your exams!