My road to AWS Certified Developer -Associate
This is the continuation of my earlier post, My road to AWS Certified Sysops Associate, and Yay now I cleared the AWS Developer exam. This is my fourth AWS certification and 18th technical certification.
WARNING: Some House Keeping task before reading this blog
1: As everyone needs to sign NDA with AWS, I can’t tell you the exact question asked during the exam; neither I have GB of memory, but I can give you the pointers what to expect in the exam.
2: As we all know, AWS infrastructure updates every day, so some of the stuff might not be relevant after a few days/weeks/months.
3: Please don’t ask for any exam dumps or question; that defeats the whole purpose of the exam.
Exam Preparation
- The acloudguru course is pretty good, but unfortunately, it doesn’t cover topics in-depth asked during the exam
- My second recommendation is Linux Academy; it covers topics in-depth but not up to the level that is required for this exam. Somehow I am not able to post the link of the LinuxAcademy course as it keeps on re-directing to ACloudGuru :-).
- AWS Re: Invent Videos: I highly recommend going through these videos, as they will give you enough in-depth knowledge about each service.
- AWS Documentation: Best documentation ever provided by any service provider. Don’t miss the FAQ regarding each service (especially for CloudWatch, CloudFormation, and Route53 ).
- My own blog
Based on my experience, you must need to know these five services to clear this exam.
- DynamoDB
- S3
- Cognito
- AWS Lambda
- API Gateway
Surprise Package: Not many questions related to SNS or Load Balancer.
1: IAM
- Understand how roles work in IAM(How to attach a role to EC2 Instance)
- STS (How STS Work), here is the link to the best video I know to learn STS
- Difference between IAM Policies(Inline vs Managed vs Custom Policy)
2: EC2
Some indirect questions related to EC2 in combination with IAM Policy and Role but nothing concrete.
3: RDS
Same as EC2 there is no direct question but in combination with elastic cache, like how to improve the performance of RDS
4: CloudFront
Securing and accessing CloudFront(HTTPS)
5: ElasticCache
- SQS Visibility timeout
- Difference between Standard vs FIFO queue
- SQS Polling(short vs long polling)
6: S3
- Make sure you have hands-on experience of creating an S3 bucket
- Understand different encryption type in S3(SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, and SSE-C), you will see 2–3 question related to S3 encryption
- 2–3 question related to CORS
- How to write S3 Bucket Policy
- This is a surprise package for me but I see 2–3 question related to S3 events
- How to host Static’s website using S3
7: Lambda
- Make sure you have hands-on experience of creating Lambda
- API gateway in the combination of lambda
- What is Lambda dead letter queue
- How to configure Lamba timeout
- Lambda versioning(How to version your Lambda function)
8: API Gateway
- Again make sure you have hands-on experience on creating API Gateway
- Various API gateway method
9: X-Ray
- 3–4 question related to X-Ray for example, how to debug the issue
10: DynamoDB
- Difference between Scan vs Query
- How to calculate Read vs Write capacity
- What is DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
- Global vs Local Secondary Index
- Difference between auto-scaling and on-demand
11: ElasticBean Stalk
- 2–3 question related to elastic beanstalk
12: CI/CD
- Understand the use of CodeCommit
- Different phases of CodeBuild
- How CodePipeline works
- How to add manual approval in your code pipeline
13: Docker
- 1–2 question related to Docker, in combination with Fargate
14: CloudFormation
- Once again you must have hands-on experience with CloudFormation
- You know how to read the cloud formation template and know the resource is the mandatory section.
- One question-related to CloudFormation with Serverless Application Model
15: Cognito
- Bunch of question-related to Cognito for example setting up mobile apps with Cognito
- Use of user pools
16: CloudWatch
- 1–2 Create and Pushing cloud watch custom metrics
17: Step Function
- one question related to step function
Final Words
- One of the mistakes I did for this exam is taking it lightly but most of the services asked in the exam I don’t have hands-on experience, so I barely crossed the finishing line. Please make sure do extra preparation for DynamoDB, CloudFormation, Cognito, API Gateway, and Lambda
- Most of the questions are too the point and rarely any scenario-based question, which means less reading.
- So keep calm and write this exam and let me know in case if you have any questions.
