AWS Developer – Associate (DVA-C02)

DVA-C02 65 items · 130 min Pass 720/1000 $150 Associate

The exam for people who ship code onto AWS. DVA-C02 validates that you can develop, deploy, secure and debug applications built on AWS services: writing against the SDKs, wiring up Lambda and DynamoDB and the messaging services, running a CI/CD pipeline, handling credentials correctly, and reading the error when it goes wrong. It is the most code-adjacent of the three associate exams, though you never write a full program in it.

The blueprint

#	Domain	Weight	Items (approx.)
1	Development with AWS Services	32%	~16
2	Security	26%	~13
3	Deployment	24%	~12
4	Troubleshooting and Optimization	18%	~9

Development and security together are 58% of the paper. The security domain here is not the architect’s security domain: it is IAM roles for compute, temporary credentials, encryption in the SDK, secrets handling and authentication for APIs — security as a developer meets it.

Exam mechanics

• 65 items, 130 minutes. 50 scored, 15 unscored pretest items mixed in unmarked.
• Scaled 100–1,000, pass at 720, compensatory across domains.
• Multiple choice and multiple response, all-or-nothing credit on multiple response.
• Unanswered items score as incorrect; there is no guessing penalty.
• Stems frequently quote an error message or a limit. Knowing exact numbers — timeouts, sizes, retry behaviour — pays on this exam more than on the other two associates.

The two note pages

#	Page	Study points	Covers
1	Platform notes	27	VPC and IP addressing, Security Groups and NACLs, gateways and endpoints, EBS, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS/Kinesis
2	Exam Q&A	25	Worked answers on EC2/EBS/ECS, RDS, S3, CloudFormation, CI/CD and CodePipeline, Elastic Beanstalk, monitoring, auto scaling

52 study points in total. Page 1 builds the platform model; page 2 is written in the shape the exam asks its questions, so it doubles as a self-test.

Numbers this exam actually asks for

Developer items are unusually specific. These are the limits and behaviours that recur:

Thing	What to remember
Lambda layers	Up to 5 per function; function code plus all layers ≤ 250 MB unzipped
Lambda cold starts	More memory buys proportionally more CPU at init; Provisioned Concurrency removes the start entirely
STS credentials	15 minutes to 12 hours; the SDK credential chain refreshes automatically — hardcoding is the usual root cause of “expired” bugs
SQS visibility timeout	Too short and a slow consumer causes duplicate processing; after maxReceiveCount, the message goes to the DLQ
DynamoDB indexes	GSI for a different partition key, LSI for a different sort key on the same partition — LSIs must exist at table creation
S3 multipart upload	Required in practice for very large objects; single PutObject tops out and is fragile over long uploads
KMS direct encryption	Small payloads only — larger data uses envelope encryption with a data key
Elastic Beanstalk policies	All-at-once, rolling, rolling with additional batch, immutable, blue/green — immutable builds a fresh fleet for instant rollback
CloudFormation	DeletionPolicy: Snapshot keeps a database alive past stack deletion; change sets show you the diff before you apply it
CodeBuild	Reads buildspec.yml from the source root unless you override it

A three-week plan

Where to go next

• Compare all five tracks on the certification tracks page.
• Solutions Architect – Associate shares most of this service surface from the design side.
• Sweep the services glossary for anything you cannot define in one sentence.