How I Passed AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C02)

In this post, I will share my experience of how I prepared and passed the AWS Certified Developer Associate Certification (DVA-C02) exam.

A few days back, I took the AWS Developer Certified Associate Certification exam DVA-C02 exam and I’m happy to share that I was able to pass it in my first attempt. :)

I felt the exam was a little tough and a bit challenging and required good hands-on experience. It was 100% developer-focused and tested me where I needed to think like a developer who is developing and maintaining AWS-based applications.

Exam Pre-requisite

You can read the exam pre-requisite here — exam guide.

The AWS Certified Developer exam validates the following —

1. Develop and optimize applications on AWS.
2. Package and deploy by using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows.
3. Secure application code and data.
4. Identify and resolve application issues.

As per the exam guide, an ideal person for this certification should have 1 or more years of hands-on experience in developing and maintaining applications by using AWS services.

I think that's a fair requirement but the problem is that not every person in his/her role uses all the AWS services that are being tested in the certification. So, even though you have experience, you will have to spend some time preparing for the exam and need to do some hands-on to get the implementation knowledge.

What Training Material I Used For Certification?

There are tons of great training materials available on the Internet for AWS Certification preparation. You can easily find a bunch of free courses on YouTube from FreeCodeCamp. AWS Skill Builder also provides free courses based on the learning path. (Check out this developer learning path).

AWS Skill Builder — Developer Learning Path:

Below is the list of courses that I have used ( and will be using in the future) for my AWS Certified Developer Associate Certification preparation —

1. Neal Davis’s — Digital Cloud Training courses with hands-on, side projects, and practice exams. (Cloud Mastery BootCamp)
2. Adrain Cantril’s DVA-C02 training course.
3. Stephen Marrak Practice Exams.
4. CloudAcademy.com hands-on labs and crash courses.
5. AWS WhitePapers and Documentation.
6. AWS Certifications subreddit

I literally used these resources to train myself to better understand each AWS service in detail. Read below my training plan on how I have utilized these resources. Remember that it's not possible to learn everything and the exam won’t expect that as well but a good conceptual understanding is very important to pass associate-level AWS certifications.

How I Prepared & Used My Training Material?

I spent around 3–4 hours for 5 days a week for around 2 months to feel confident before sitting in the real exam.

I have 1.5 + years of experience working as a developer building and maintaining applications on AWS (Serverless apps) but I have not worked on many other AWS services that are important for the exam(like Elastic Bean stalk, RDS, etc.). So I had to spend a good amount of time reading and understanding them with lots and lots of hands-on labs.

1. I started with Neal Davis's DVA-C02 training course initially. His course is pretty much spot on for examination. Short videos with relevant information helped me to learn about AWS services with hands-on labs. Since I had studied for the AWS Solution Architect exam in the past, I was able to refresh those things with Neal’s AWS Solution Architect course also. His DVA-C02 course is designed well keeping the developer role in mind. He deep-dived on a few topics that are important for the exam like API Gateway, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, Dev tools, CI/CD, SQS, SNS, and many more. In his course, he emphasized working with AWS services via AWS CLI which is important for the developer associate exam.
2. After completing Neal’s course with hands-on exercises and side projects, I took Neal’s services-specific practice tests and found a few weak areas where I needed detailed information on the topics. For example — Databases (RDS, DynamoDB), Security (Cognito, KMS, IAM), Troubleshooting (X-Ray), etc.
3. I also watched Adrian Cantrill's AWS Certified Developer Course videos for services where I needed in-depth understanding. Adrian’s course is very detail oriented and his way of explaining things is very nice along with hands-on. His courses are very comprehensive and he has worked really hard and spent great efforts in creating great AWS courses.
4. Parallel to all these, I was also using Cloud Academy’s hands-on labs and challenges for Hands-On. The challenge labs were very useful for gaining practical knowledge. I really like the labs because sometimes it's not possible to do hands-on a personal AWS account because not all services are free in free-tier. I used those labs to practice API Gateway, Cognito, DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Elastic Bean Stalk, EC2, ASG, and Deployments using developer tools, CLI, X-Ray, etc. Here is a complete list of challenge labs — Cloud Academy's AWS Certification Prep Lab Challenges
5. Most importantly, while going through the practice test, I spent a good amount of time understanding the questions and analyzing the options, reading AWS documentation in depth, whitepapers, blog posts, and my own notes so that I could revise them again because it's not possible to remember everything.
6. In my last week, I took full-length practice tests. Started with Neal’s Practice tests (6 — Full length + 1 Full-length Exam Simulator) and then I took Stephen Marrack's (6 — Full Length) tests. I did not repeat the tests, instead, I reviewed all incorrect questions + questions marked for review and took notes. I consistently scored 85–90% on Neal’s practice exams and 70–76% on Stephen Marrack’s practice exam.
7. In the end, I took the main AWS certified developer associate test and got 811 out of 1000. :)

I was also following the AWS Certifications subreddit. It helped me a lot and it guided me toward the study material and practice exams that worked well for me.

My Exam Experience

I booked my exam in person at the nearest test center using the Pearson Vue website.

In the past, I used to book online at-home exams but this time I wanted to experience the in-person exam and I think it's much better than taking the exam at home. The check-in process was smooth, they just asked for one government ID (I used my driving license), and asked me to sign a few papers specific to exam policies and rules, and within 10 minutes I was ready to take my exam.

I have also used the +30 mins accommodation which is available for non-native English speakers at the time of exam scheduling. I was able to verify that it was applied correctly before starting the exam.

During the exam, I found:

1. On average, the questions were a little lengthy.
2. The exam tests your ability to read the question preamble, the problem statement, and the options very carefully and consistently without tiring. I was able to develop that skill during the practice exams.
3. Sometimes I had to read the question twice or thrice to understand it as the language of a few of them was not that clear at least for me.
4. Some questions were very straightforward and were very close to what I solved in the practice exams.
5. I found that around 50% of questions had scenarios with multiple AWS services integrations and options were to figure out the correct way to integrate them.
6. I marked questions for review for which I was not confident and were a little ambiguous to me even after spending a couple of minutes. Later, revisiting them helped me understand the problem, and was able to choose the correct option. (I verified those later after the exam as I was able to remember the scenarios of those questions and the selection of options and of course, some were incorrect as well :-) ).
7. Because of the extra 30 minutes of accommodation, I was able to spend a little extra time on a few lengthy questions and it was really helpful.

After the exam:

After the exam, AWS did not show me the result and I was kind of tense as the exam was tough and I made a few incorrect choices for a few questions that I reviewed after the exam. I was not even able to sleep that night and was checking my emails regularly. Finally, around 5:15 AM in the morning, I saw an email from Credly - “Congratulations, you have earned a badge”. Gosh! That was a moment for me.

Final Few Suggestions —

Here are a few resources which helped me to get some hands-on experience and are really important for this exam —

1. Get hands-on with AWS services to prepare for the AWS Certified Developer — Associate exam
2. AWS Workshops. Excellent 100+ workshops created by AWS teams to provide hands-on events designed to introduce practical skills.
3. AWS Github code for projects here.
4. Adrian Cantrill’s AWS Labs.

Take Notes:

Take notes as you prepare your training material. I have published an article on a focus area specific to a few AWS services that I prepared and were part of the exam in some or another way.

Tips to Pass:

Just after passing my exam, I put together a list of AWS services and topics that should prepare well before the exam. Please check the post below for more information.

Conclusion

I successfully achieved the AWS Solution Architect Associate certification in the past but this certification helped me further broaden my experience as an AWS Developer. It helped me to understand how to develop with AWS services, utilize multiple services in the architecture, implement different integration patterns, available storage and database options for developers based on different use cases and architectures, performance tuning, troubleshooting serverless architectures, implement secured applications, deployments with developer tools, and much more.

I think anyone who is working as a developer should experience this examination as it would definitely expand their knowledge.

I hope you enjoyed reading my story — How I passed the DVA-C02 exam and I will be more than happy if it will help you in achieving the same. In case you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at LinkedIn or drop your comments here and I would love to help.