AWS Certified Developer Associate 2026 – DVA-C02

Explore the AWS certified developer associate exam, its version history, structure of 65 questions in 2 hours 10 minutes, 728 pass mark, 14-day retake wait, and ongoing updates.

Explore the four AWS developer associate exam domains: development with AWS services, security, deployment, and troubleshooting and optimization, plus key concepts like Lambda and CI/CD.

Explore how Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers on-demand cloud computing resources, including S3 and SQS, enabling storage, compute, databases, analytics, and AI.

Explore the AWS global infrastructure, including regions, availability zones, edge locations, and regional edge caches, to deliver highly available, fault-tolerant cloud services with low latency.

Explore the AWS cloud adoption framework to align capabilities across six perspectives—business, people, governance, platform, security, operations—and accelerate cloud-driven transformation with pilots and measurable outcomes.

learn to set up AWS budgets to monitor costs, create a monthly cost budget, and receive automated alerts at 85% and 100% thresholds to prevent surprises.

Gain an overview of AWS services by category, learn naming conventions, and explore fully managed options like EC2, S3, RDS, EKS, and Route 53 for exam prep.

Explore AWS compute services such as EC2, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, LightSail, Batch, and Outpost, and see how virtualization, virtual machines, serverless, and orchestration enable scalable cloud workloads.

Explore AWS container services such as ECS, EKS, Fargate, and ECR to run containerized microservices, manage tasks, and streamline container migrations with A2C and Copilot.

Explore how AWS deployment services automate provisioning, configuration, deployment, and monitoring of cloud resources with infrastructure as code, including CloudFormation, CDK, SAM, Elastic Beanstalk, CodeDeploy, ECS, EKS, and Proton.

Explore AWS database services across relational, NoSQL, and in-memory options. Learn about RDS, Aurora, Redshift, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, ElastiCache, and specialized engines.

Explore AWS application integration services, including SQS, SNS, Step Functions, MQ, EventBridge, AppSync, and AppFlow, to decouple microservices, enable event-driven workflows, and secure data transfers.

Explore AWS analytics services for real-time and batch data processing, ETL, and data visualization. Build data lakes and data warehouses with Kinesis, Athena, Redshift, Glue, EMR, and QuickSight.

Learn how AWS identity services secure identities, resources, and permissions across cloud and on-premises, featuring IAM, Cognito, single sign-on, SSO, and Directory Service.

Explore AWS machine learning services, led by SageMaker, and learn how computer vision, language AI, and customer experience tools power automated data analysis and DevOps workflows.

Explore AWS storage services overview, including EC2 instance store, EBS, S3, Glacier, EFS, FSx, AWS Backup, and Storage Gateway, enabling on-premises integration, and support for block, object, and file storage.

Explore AWS audit and compliance services, including CloudTrail, AWS Artifact, and AWS Security Hub, to track user activity, API usage, resource creation, and security posture across accounts.

Learn how AWS networking and content delivery services secure private connectivity and accelerate global delivery using VPC, Route 53, CloudFront, Global Accelerator, PrivateLink, and API Gateway.

Learn how to provision, manage, and govern AWS resources using the AWS Management Console, CLI, and mobile app, and enforce governance with AWS Config, Organizations, Service Catalog, and Control Tower.

Discover AWS data transfer and migration options, including DataSync, snowcone and snowball, and migration tools like Application Discovery Service, Data Migration Service, Server Migration Service, Migration Hub, and Migration Evaluator.

Learn how IAM handles authentication and authorization to securely control access to AWS resources. Discover identities such as users, groups, and roles, and apply least-privilege policies across resources.

Explore how AWS identity and access management enables secure access to resources through IAM users, groups, and roles, with policies, permissions, and cross-account and service-linked roles.

Explore how IAM policies grant permissions for IAM identities and AWS resources, including identity-based, resource-based, and permissions boundaries, with examples like S3:PutObject, IP conditions, and MFA.

Explore the anatomy of an IAM policy and how a JSON policy document combines policy-wide information with version, id, and multiple statements to control access using actions, resources, and conditions.

Explore how AWS IAM policy evaluation determines allow or deny decisions, including implicit denies, explicit allows and denials in conflicts, with examples of IP, region, and service conditions.

Learn to install, configure, and use the AWS CLI from Windows, Mac, or Linux, including creating an IAM access key pair and running basic S3 commands.

Learn how Amazon VPC creates a regional virtual network with CIDR blocks, route tables, and subnets across availability zones, enabling public and private networks and security groups and ACLs.

Explore the anatomy of Amazon VPC, including CIDR blocks, subnets, and route tables. Learn how gateways, DHCP options, NAT devices, ACLs, security groups, and VPC endpoints enable private connectivity.

Explore hands-on creation of an AWS VPC with three public and three private subnets across multiple availability zones, and configure internet and NAT gateways, route tables, and cleanup steps.

Explore AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that runs code in the cloud with no servers to manage, create a Lambda function, upload code, and pay only for compute time.

Explore synchronous and asynchronous Lambda invocation, as API Gateway, S3 events, and CloudWatch Events trigger functions and return 200 and 202 status codes accordingly.

Create a Lambda function from scratch in the Lambda console and test it with a sample event. Invoke it synchronously and asynchronously using the AWS CLI and check CloudWatch logs.

Learn the init, invoke, and shutdown phases of a lambda function, and how reducing dependencies and reusing the execution environment lessen cold starts.

See how cold starts work in AWS Lambda with a demo that contrasts the init and invoke phases, and shows how duration, billed duration, memory, and init duration are calculated.

Learn how to reuse the Lambda execution context to reduce latency by moving database connections outside the handler, caching /tmp data, and reusing downloaded S3 files across invocations.

Learn to deploy Python code with external dependencies to AWS Lambda by installing dependencies into a deployment package, placing them outside the handler, building a zip, and uploading it.

Learn to deploy a Python code with an external dependency to AWS Lambda. Package the dependency, such as PyMySQL, into a zip, upload, configure the handler, and test.

Learn how AWS Lambda passes a JSON-formatted event object and a context object to your handler, and use getRemainingTimeInMillis to monitor execution.

Learn how Lambda layers let you share external dependencies across multiple Lambda functions, shrinking deployment packages, speeding deployments, and separating dependency management from your function logic.

Understand AWS Lambda concurrency and the default 1,000 unreserved executions per region per account. Reserve concurrency to prevent throttling and protect other functions while managing costs.

Connect a Lambda function to a VPC by attaching the AWSLambdaVPCAccessExecutionRole policy to manage elastic network interfaces, then configure subnets, security groups, and a NAT gateway for internet access.

Learn how AWS Lambda versions are published and immutable, use aliases to point to specific versions for canary testing, and reference functions by name or ARN.

Explore how Amazon EC2 delivers scalable cloud computing with Linux or Windows virtual machines, integrated storage, networking, Auto Scaling, and AMI-based backups and migrations.

Learn how Amazon Machine Image (AMI) pre-configures EC2 instances for fast deployment, auto scaling, and regional copying, including components like volume snapshots, block device mapping, and launch permissions.

Automate EC2 launches with instance user data, running a base64-encoded script at startup to mount EFS and apply consistent configurations across auto scaling groups for auditing.

Explore how Amazon EC2 uses instance metadata to expose per-instance details such as AMI, hostname, private and public IP addresses, security groups, and IAM roles via the instance metadata service.

Launch and configure an EC2 spot instance to save up to 90 percent, using spot fleet requests, key pairs, and placement scores to choose regions and instance types.

Discover how to create an Amazon machine image from an EBS-backed EC2 instance, capture snapshots, and launch new EC2 servers from the custom AMI.

Learn to connect to an EC2 instance using EC2 Instance Connect via a browser SSH terminal in AWS. Set up key pairs and security group rules for secure access.

Master placement groups in AWS EC2 by configuring cluster, partition, and spread strategies to optimize latency, throughput, fault tolerance, and availability across instances.

Explore how AWS Key Management Service creates and rotates encryption keys, enforces access with key policies, and enables auditing with CloudTrail while using envelope encryption and CMK types.

Learn how to encrypt and decrypt a text file using AWS KMS CLI, create a key alias, and handle base64 encoded outputs in a practical lab demonstration.

Explore the most common aws kms api commands: encrypt, decrypt, generate data key, and generate data key without plaintext, and learn envelope encryption with a cmk.

Explore Amazon S3, a durable, highly available object storage service that uses buckets and objects with metadata, prefixes, and a global namespace for scalable, serverless data storage.

Explore Amazon S3 storage classes, including S3 Standard, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Glacier, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive, with durability, availability, and use cases.

Explore how to implement and enforce access control in Amazon S3 with bucket policies, including principals, actions, resources, and optional conditions for granular, public or restricted access.

Explore Amazon S3 encryption methods, including server-side options SSE-KMS, SSE-S3, SSE-C, and client-side encryption with the AWS Encryption SDK, covering encryption-at-rest and encryption-in-transit.

Learn how Amazon S3 event notifications provide alerts for new object creation, deletion, restoration, and replication events, delivered to SNS, SQS, or Lambda, with versioning ensuring write triggers a notification.

Compare S3 storage classes by analyzing minimum storage durations and pro-rated charges to determine when S3 standard is cheaper than Glacier for temporary or short-lived data.