How to Prepare for AWS Cloud Developer Associate Exam

Introduction

In Amazon certification, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is not a specialized certification for the IT industry. This certificate can be taken by those who are far from software development and I would like to get a more valuable certificate.

I was especially interested in the AWS Cloud developer certificate since I am a developer and I wanted to study the developer tools more deeply. When I was choosing which certificate to take, in fact, I then had the choice of one of three exams of more Associate level. For clarity - AWS certification card is shown in image 1.

In this article, I want to show what I used to pass the exam, how I went through the exam process, and what services I would recommend paying attention to.

Preparation Courses for Certification

I used courses with Udemy: AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam Training 2021.

You can try another instructor like Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2021.

There are also official courses, but I haven't used them, they are all in English.

To pass the exam, you need to score 72% of the 65 questions. The exam lasts 140 minutes, which is rather short for such a large number of questions. But I was able to get an extra 30 minutes.

Exam Process

The test can be taken from home, but they have certain requirements for the room where you will take the exam. I took in a special computer center.

There are also requirements for working and resolving problems related to AWS in one year, but as you can imagine, this is not a requirement. So everyone with a certain experience and knowledge can pass the exam.

Before registering, you can indicate that English is your second language if this is true. Then they will give 30 minutes of extra time for the next exam. I don’t know how they check this, but the approval came a few minutes after the request. By the way, that extra 30 minutes helped me a lot.

Compared to the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, the questions themselves have become larger. They focus on how problems can be solved. Quite often I've seen two or three answers seem to work, but only one turns out to be 100 percent correct. In addition, there are much fewer questions about knowing what services are responsible for.

Services That Deserve Your Attention

Throughout the exam, I constantly came across questions on the knowledge of CLI commands. So for successful delivery, you need to know how to work with the AWS CLI, be able to build your own private VPC. Most of the questions concern three services: Lambda, DynamoDB, ECS (Elastic Container Service). And I needed to know how all these three services can be integrated with each other.

In Lambda, you need to know the different types of function calls, asynchronous and synchronous, how they differ, how to create different versions of Lambda functions, how they differ from Aliases, what is @LambdaEdge, Lambda Environment Variables. You also need to know Monitoring, Logging, and Tracing.

In the DynamoDB part, which is the second most important resource required to pass the exam, you need to understand and be able to read Provisioned Throughput (RCU and WCU). You also need to know how the Scan API differs from the Query API, what is the difference between a global secondary index (GSI) and a local secondary index (LSI), how to enable DynamoDB streams, how to add time to live (TTL) for items, what is the difference between DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) and Elasticache.

The third most important service is ECS. In this area, you should clearly understand what Docker is, be able to deploy your containers on Fargate and EC2, and, in addition, understand the difference between them. You can then deploy the container repository to ECR. Before doing this, you should be able to call AutoScaling and Load Balancer on your containers and understand the placement strategies and the cluster query language.

Then you need to know the difference between SQS and SNS services. Less knowledge required but required in IAM, Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, API Gateway, SAM, Route 53, S3 and Cloud Front, load balancing, and AutoScaling. In the meantime, you should know the services provided by the CI / CD developer: Cloud 9, CodePipeline, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy. I would like to point out that this list is not limited to these services only.

Conclusion

In this article, I showed you which courses can be used to prepare for the exam, the exam process itself, and what services you should pay attention to in order to prepare for the exam. Now passing this exam is not an impossible task and everyone can pass this exam with the same preparation.