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My AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C01) Experience

By January 28, 2022April 13th, 2023AWS, Cloud

If you are keeping your new year’s resolution of getting more certifications and are currently studying for the Certified Developer Associate, I got you. Keep reading to find what resources I used, how long I studied, and tips that I have.

Honestly, if you take this right after SAA-C02, you might not need to study that much. For me I took about 3 weeks for this exam. The topics overlap quite a bit and I felt pretty confident while doing the prep work. If this is your first associate exam, the resources are going to be sourced from the same place.

The price of the exam is $150, but I had a 50% exam voucher that I got from my previous SAA-C02 exam. Therefore, from its original price, I only paid $75 for this exam!

Exam Prep Resources

Exam Tips

  • This exam topics are focused on just 4 serverless services: Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway and Fargate. If you master these, then you should be fine. Like the SAA, be aware of other services such as X-Ray, Amazon CloudWatch Events (Amazon EventBridge), EC2, IAM, S3, Cognito, etc.
  • Take advantage of the practice exams to find your weakness. Jon’s exams make it very easy to pinpoint which topic you are having trouble with. Take all of them to be extra confident about the exam.
  • Take the exam online. Especially with covid around right now, it is not a great time to be out. I took the exam with Pearson Vue and it was a pretty smooth experience.
  • Use AWS free year of resources to play around in the environment. Nothing makes it easier than actually building out and playing with the services themselves.

Above all, good luck with the exam and let me know if you passed!

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