AWS Developer study guide
AWS Developer · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) is an intermediate-level credential for people who build and maintain applications on AWS. It suits developers with roughly a year of hands-on experience writing code that talks to AWS services, plus a working feel for the console, the CLI, and infrastructure-as-code tooling. Unlike the Solutions Architect track, this exam stays close to the code: how your application authenticates, stores state, handles asynchronous work, and ships to production. The content splits into four weighted areas. Topics on this exam: Development with AWS Services, Security, Deployment, and Troubleshooting and Optimization. The AWS Developer study guide has 4 sections and about 1,228 words.
01Development with AWS Services
Lambda sits at the center of most developer questions: know the three invocation models. Synchronous (API Gateway, ALB) surfaces errors to the caller and never retries. Asynchronous (S3, SNS, EventBridge) retries twice and then routes to a dead-letter queue or destination. Poll-based (SQS, Kinesis, DynamoDB Streams) batches records, and partial batch failures need ReportBatchItemFailures .
307 words, about 2 min02Security
IAM evaluation logic is the backbone: an explicit Deny always wins, then an Allow must exist from an identity-based policy, a resource-based policy, a permissions boundary, a session policy, or an SCP. SCPs and permission boundaries only filter; they never grant. Roles are assumed through STS, and a role has two policies that are easy to confuse: the trust policy (who may assume it) and the permissions policy (what the role can do). For encryption, know KMS customer managed keys versus AWS managed keys, that a key policy must allow a principal before an IAM policy can help, and the S3 encryption options (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C, client side).
314 words, about 2 min03Deployment
Know the CI/CD stack: CodePipeline stages and actions with artifacts passed through S3, CodeBuild buildspec phases ( install , pre build , build , post build ) and environment variables, and CodeDeploy applications, deployment groups, and the appsec file. For EC2, CodeDeploy supports in-place and blue/green and requires the CodeDeploy agent plus a service role. For Lambda, it offers canary, linear, and all-at-once traffic shifting. For ECS, blue/green targets two task sets behind a load balancer.
300 words, about 2 min04Troubleshooting and Optimization
Separate the observability tools clearly. CloudWatch holds metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards, Logs Insights queries, and metric filters. CloudTrail records API activity for auditing. X-Ray traces request paths with segments and subsegments and answers where latency lives.
307 words, about 2 min