About two weeks ago, after 4 months of preparation, I passed my AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C01) with a 921/1000 score. This short bullet article lists my tips for the exam. What to do, and what you should avoid whilst preparing.

tl;dr

• Paid Stephane Maarek Udemy Course if you have never worked with AWS
• Paid A Cloud Guru Course for summarising and complementing missing knowledge
• Paid Qwiklabs for hands-on labs
• Free FAQ is a set of questions similar to those on the exam (by the content, not the form)
• Free Whitepapers and User Guides if you want to know more than expected
• Free AWS re:Invent videos with best practices and tips
• Free AWS Learning Library is full of official short courses and tutorials
• Exam is 130 minutes long and 65 questions
• Questions are scenario-based
• It’s really exhausting
• You will see the result information immediately after the test, details up to 5 business days
• You can share results with a link, as a badge or simply print it

Preparation

Stephane Maarek Courses

I started my journey to certification with “Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2020 - NEW!”. Before that, I had only been working with S3 from AWS. Stephane’s Course is full of great hands-on labs. His commitment to making the course as good as possible is remarkable, and I have no hesitation in recommending it ;) Simply, I love the way Stephane teaches.

A Cloud Guru

When I was looking for resources to learn AWS, I found this to be the most widely known course series for any AWS Certificate. And it’s really that good. Of course, getting your hands dirty with AWS Services is still better for the long term, but ACG is really good at summarising and complementing missing knowledge. As in the Stephane course, ACG summarises and puts short tests at the end of each section.

Qwiklabs

Instead of just theoretical knowledge, Qwiklabs is focused on practice. Pick one of the real-world-like scenarios and follow the instructions. Most of the labs are long and require focusing on the topic. Personally, I liked it, even if it is one of the more expensive ways of learning AWS.

FAQs, Whitepapers and User Guides

Frequently Asked Questions is a section on the AWS official website which should be considered as a database with potential exam questions. User Guides are very well-written documents, describing AWS technologies and services. Everything from setup, tutorials, best practices and corner cases is described. To be honest, because they are so long (the EC2 User Guide is over 1000 pages in length https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-ug.pdf) I haven’t read them all. Instead, I looked over sections specified in the certificate requirements.

AWS re:Invent Videos

Every year AWS has its own conference for tech enthusiasts. The event is full of breakout sessions led by experienced AWS mentors. Videos from their public speaking are uploaded to YouTube. Some of the notable videos:

EC2 Best Practices

ELB Best Practices

S3 Security & Management

DynamoDB Deep Dive

DynamoDB Performance Tricks

AWS Learning Library

Official library with short courses, great for organising knowledge. Especially ones like “Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Developer – Associate (Digital)”, which show what you should know before taking an exam and what the exam will look like.

Exam

Questions on the exam are scenario-based, which means they usually place you in some situation and your task is to solve the problem. Sometimes it could be a problem with connecting to an EC2 Instance, setting up storage for an application with a limited budget, or preparing secure architecture with many services for a large commercial bank. Answers are similar to each other, and they differ in the details.

You have 130 minutes and 65 questions to complete the test. It’s enough; however, at around the 40th question, my mind slowed down and I was very exhausted because every time I moved to the next question, it was a totally different situation with a problem to solve.

When you finish the test, you will see immediately if you have passed or not. The detailed score, certificate and access to AWS Certified benefits will be sent within 5 business days.

After Exam

You can put a certificate badge on your LinkedIn profile with a unique link and identifiers, share it with your coworkers and boss, or print it.

Good luck with the exam! :)

This post was originally published on Dev.to