Examworthyexamworthy.comAWS Certified Developer - Associate cheat sheet
Amazon Web Services
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At a glance
Format: Multiple choice and multiple response
Domain weight map
Heaviest first - spend your time hereHow this exam thinks
DVA-C02 is a build-it-correctly exam: almost every question is a developer scenario where the right answer is the AWS service, API behaviour, or configuration that satisfies the stated requirement - idempotency, ordering, least privilege, latency, or a safe deploy - with the least operational overhead.
Spot the trap
Tempting wrong answers, and why they failCommon misconception
That a shared SQS queue gives every consumer a copy of each message. A standard queue delivers each message once, so pollers compete rather than each receiving it.
Development with AWS Services
Common misconception
That every application end user should get their own IAM user for sign-in and password resets. IAM is for workforce and service access, not an end-user directory.
Security
Common misconception
That the platform would refuse a configuration it cannot resolve cleanly. Lambda accepts overlapping layer paths silently and lets the later layer overwrite the earlier one.
Deployment
Common misconception
That a PutMetricData call per request is a reasonable way to record custom metrics. At high throughput it adds a synchronous call, latency and cost to every invocation.
Troubleshooting and Optimization
Common misconception
That exponential backoff on its own clears synchronised retries. Without jitter every thread computes the same delay and collides again on the next attempt.
Development with AWS Services
Common misconception
That an IAM access key shipped inside a distributed mobile app is an acceptable way to authorise uploads. It can be extracted from the bundle and never rotates.
Security
Common misconception
That a Lambda container serves events on a listening port. Lambda hands events to the Runtime Interface Client over its runtime API, so a web server in the image receives nothing.
Deployment
Common misconception
That the top rows of a duration sort are the p99. Sorting shows the slowest individual events, so one outlier can sit at the top while a route's p99 is healthy.
Troubleshooting and Optimization
Key terms
Exam-day rules
- Read the scenario for its requirement first - ordering, idempotency, least privilege, latency, no-downtime deploy - then choose the option built for it. The requirement, not the service's popularity, decides the answer.
- When two answers both work, pick the managed, least-operational-overhead one unless the scenario names a reason to go lower-level. An assumed role beats a stored key; a conditional write beats a read-then-write lock; an alias beats a redeploy.
- Treat any answer with a long-lived access key, a wildcard IAM policy, or the root user as the trap. Application identity is almost always an IAM role assumed with AWS STS.
- On DynamoDB questions, check the access pattern: if you know the key, it is a query, not a scan; a filter expression does not cut a scan's read cost; pick a GSI for a new key and an LSI for an alternate sort on the same key.
- Capitalise and obey negative words in stems (NOT, EXCEPT, LEAST). On multiple-response questions, the exam tells you how many to choose - select exactly that many.
Revision schedule
- Day 1Map the four domains to your real experience
- Week 1Drill the core build services until the APIs are reflexive
- Week 2Learn identity, encryption, and secrets as decision rules
- Week 3Build and ship with the deployment tooling
- Week 4Instrument, trace, and tune