Passing the AWS Developer Associate Certification

I recently passed the developer associate certification with AWS, and wanted to share how I went about preparing for it.

To start, I would highly recommend downloading the study guide, and then paying $20 to take the practice exam. The practice exam gives you a sense of the level of detail the questions ask and the overall structure of the questions. The questions themselves are framed like scenarios such as, "Company X is trying to go serverless with service A with CI/CD through service B, but something goes wrong. What could be making it go wrong?"

I found this blog post from DigitalCloudTraining.com that was pretty on the money as far as the breakdown of the subject matter goes (I have no affiliation with them). My impression is that AWS is making a push for companies to adopt a serverless architecture model so that would explain the emphasis on Lambda, DynamoDB, APIGateway, etc.

Fundamentally, I would make an effort to understand how these services relate to each other. The questions rarely ask about services in isolation, mainly because these services aren't really meant to be used in isolation. I wouldn't worry too much about the granular steps on how to implement a service. My guess is that AWS realizes people can always refer back to their documentation for granular details.

My own exact approach to this was more of a nose to the grindstone technique. I did the practice exam and then started to make a mind map of all the services. The biggest questions I always asked myself while studying were: 

• What does this service do fundamentally? 

• What other services does it logically connect to in order to enhance its functionality? 

• How does it fit into the five subject domaines laid out in the AWS exam guide?

Using these questions, I read through the documentation as much as possible.

I also went through the FreeCodeCamp tutorial, but found the coverage of each individual service to be too shallow. However, their follow-alongs were quite useful as they provided their own code which was more than just the stock code provided by AWS. If you tend to learn hands on, I would recommend doing both the FreeCodeCamp follow-along and the tutorials provided by AWS in their documentation. Also, be sure to use the CLI or SDK as much as possible. You are doing the developer associate certification after all and want to do as much as possible programmatically.

In summary:

• Use the AWS Exam guide and the DigitalCloudTraining blog post as guides

• Take the practice exam

• Know what each service does fundamentally, how it fits together, and how it fits into the five subject matters

• If you do get hands on with the services, be sure to use the SDK and CLI as much as possible

Hope this helps, good luck!