What's on the Developer exam

The AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) validates your ability to develop, test, deploy, and debug applications that run on AWS. It is the associate certification written for people whose day job is writing code, rather than designing infrastructure. AWS recommends one or more years of hands-on experience building and maintaining applications with AWS services, plus proficiency in at least one high-level programming language such as Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or Go.

Domains covered

The exam is organized into weighted domains. The percentages indicate roughly how much of the exam each domain represents, which is a useful guide for allocating study time.

Development with AWS Services 32%

Writing application code that runs on AWS: architectural patterns such as event-driven, microservices, and fan-out; stateful versus stateless design; synchronous versus asynchronous patterns; building and maintaining APIs; calling AWS services through SDKs and the CLI; and using Amazon EventBridge for event-driven integration. This domain also covers AWS Lambda in depth — configuration, concurrency, layers, destinations, dead-letter queues, VPC access, and performance tuning — alongside data store work including DynamoDB keys and indexes, partition key design, consistency models, query versus scan, and caching.

Security 26%

Securing the applications you build: federated access with Amazon Cognito and IAM, bearer tokens, assuming IAM roles, and defining permissions for principals. Encryption is covered end to end — at rest and in transit, client-side versus server-side, key rotation, certificate management, and encryption across account boundaries — as is handling sensitive data in code through secret management services, encrypted environment variables, data classification, and application-level masking.

Deployment 24%

Getting code into environments reliably: packaging application artifacts and their dependencies, preparing per-environment configuration with services such as AWS AppConfig, and testing in development environments including API Gateway stages and mock integrations. It also covers infrastructure as code with AWS SAM and CloudFormation templates, Lambda versions and aliases, and release strategies including blue/green, canary, and rolling deployments with rollback.

Troubleshooting and Optimization 18%

Finding and fixing problems in running applications: debugging defects, interpreting metrics, logs, and traces, querying logs, and emitting custom metrics such as the CloudWatch embedded metric format. It also covers instrumenting code for observability with structured logging and tracing annotations, plus optimization work — concurrency, right-sizing memory and compute, caching strategies, and identifying bottlenecks from application logs.

How to prepare

The exam is code-centric rather than architecture-centric: you are asked how you would implement, configure, and debug something, not how you would design a system from scratch. AWS explicitly places several tasks out of scope — designing architectures, designing CI/CD pipelines, administering IAM users and groups, administering servers and operating systems, and designing VPC networking. Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and the CI/CD services carry the most weight, so hands-on familiarity with those pays off more than broad reading. Note that of the 65 questions, 50 are scored and 15 are unscored trial questions, and there is no penalty for guessing. The current guide also includes skills covering the use of Amazon Q Developer to assist with development and to generate automated tests.

Exam formats and passing scores are updated periodically by AWS. Always confirm the current details on the official AWS certification page before booking your exam.