Exam at a glance
- Exam name: AWS Certified Developer — Associate (DVA-C02)
- Questions: 65 total (multiple-choice and multiple-response)
- Time: 130 minutes
- Delivery: Pearson VUE testing center or online proctored exam
- Result: Scaled score (100–1000); minimum passing score: 720
- Cost: 150 USD
Tip: DVA-C02 rewards “developer realism”: secure-by-default IAM, event-driven patterns, idempotency, and practical troubleshooting with CloudWatch/X-Ray.
Domain breakdown (weights)
- Domain 1: Development with AWS Services (32%)
- Domain 2: Security (26%)
- Domain 3: Deployment (24%)
- Domain 4: Troubleshooting and Optimization (18%)
What the exam emphasizes (high level)
Expect scenario-driven items where you choose the best solution for:
- Building with AWS primitives (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, messaging)
- Applying security correctly (IAM roles/policies, authn/authz, encryption, secrets)
- Deploying safely (CI/CD, IaC, config/params, versioning/rollback)
- Debugging production issues (logs, metrics, traces, retries, throttling)
Who should take DVA-C02
- Application developers building or maintaining AWS workloads
- Engineers working with serverless and event-driven architectures
- Developers who can reason about security, reliability, and cost/performance trade-offs
Recommended background: ~1 year of hands-on experience with AWS services and the AWS SDK/CLI at a developer level (not deep networking).
Study plan (efficient)
- Work the Syllabus domain-by-domain and drill immediately after each domain.
- Keep a miss log: convert each miss into a one-liner rule (“DynamoDB Query vs Scan”, “SQS visibility timeout”, “Lambda retry/DLQ”).
- Do mixed sets twice weekly to build transfer across services.
- Final week: 2–3 full timed mocks; review every miss and re-drill weak domains.
Ready to start structured study? Open the Syllabus.