AWS Certified Developer Associate DVA-C02: Study Guide 2026

Who Is the AWS Developer Associate For?

The AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C02) targets software developers and engineers who build, deploy, and debug cloud-native applications on AWS. It assumes at least one year of hands-on AWS development experience and a working knowledge of at least one high-level programming language. Unlike the Solutions Architect Associate, the Developer exam goes deeper on application integration, serverless architecture, and developer tooling rather than broad infrastructure design.

The exam contains 65 questions (50 scored, 15 unscored) across a 130-minute window. Passing score is 720 out of 1000. Question formats include multiple choice (one correct answer) and multiple response (two or more correct answers from five or six options). Multiple-response questions are harder — eliminate clearly wrong options first, then evaluate the remaining choices.

The Five DVA-C02 Exam Domains

• Development with AWS Services (32%): The largest domain. Covers serverless application patterns (Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions), event-driven architectures with SQS, SNS, and EventBridge, DynamoDB data modeling, and S3 operations from application code. Know how to write Lambda functions, configure triggers, and handle errors with dead-letter queues.
• Security (26%): IAM roles for applications, Cognito user pools and identity pools, Secrets Manager and Parameter Store, AWS KMS encryption patterns, and HTTPS configuration for API Gateway. Understand how to authenticate API calls using Cognito authorizers versus Lambda authorizers.
• Deployment (24%): Elastic Beanstalk deployment policies (all at once, rolling, rolling with additional batch, immutable, traffic splitting), CodeDeploy for Lambda and EC2, CodePipeline integration, and SAM (Serverless Application Model) for packaging and deploying serverless applications.
• Troubleshooting and Optimization (18%): AWS X-Ray for distributed tracing, CloudWatch Logs Insights, Lambda performance tuning (memory allocation, provisioned concurrency, connection reuse), and DynamoDB performance issues (hot partition keys, on-demand vs. provisioned capacity).

Key Services You Must Know Cold

Lambda and API Gateway

Lambda is the most tested service. Know the execution model (cold starts, invocation types: synchronous vs. asynchronous vs. poll-based), environment variables and Secrets Manager integration, Lambda layers, and the 15-minute maximum execution timeout. For API Gateway, understand REST vs. HTTP vs. WebSocket APIs, deployment stages, throttling, and Lambda proxy integration versus custom integration.

DynamoDB

DynamoDB questions are frequent and tricky. You need to understand partition keys vs. sort keys, Global Secondary Indexes (GSIs) vs. Local Secondary Indexes (LSIs), the DynamoDB Streams event format, TTL for automatic item expiration, and the difference between GetItem, Query, and Scan operations in terms of cost and performance. Hot partition scenarios appear regularly.

SQS, SNS, and Cognito

For SQS, know standard queues versus FIFO queues, visibility timeout, message retention, and dead-letter queue configuration. For SNS, understand fan-out patterns to multiple SQS queues. For Cognito, know the difference between user pools (authentication — who you are) and identity pools (authorization — what AWS resources you can access), and how they are used together.

Code vs. Architecture Questions

The DVA-C02 includes a small number of code-level questions — typically involving SDK usage, CLI commands, or reading a short code snippet and identifying a bug. These are not deep programming questions; they test whether you know how AWS SDK calls work (presigned URLs, SDK retry behavior, credential chain resolution) and whether you can read environment variable usage in Lambda functions. These questions are worth practicing because they are fast points.

Architecture questions make up the majority of the exam and are significantly harder. For these, the key heuristic is: always choose the most serverless, most managed solution that meets the requirement. If a question asks how to process messages from an SQS queue with variable load, Lambda with an SQS event source mapping will beat EC2 Auto Scaling almost every time on this exam.

Study Resources and a Proven Prep Plan

Stephane Maarek's AWS Developer Associate course on Udemy is the most complete video resource available. Combine it with Tutorials Dojo or Jon Bonso practice exams, targeting a consistent score of 80% or above before booking the real exam. Plan for 40 to 50 hours of total study time. Hands-on labs are essential — create a free-tier AWS account and build a serverless API backed by Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and Cognito to internalize how these services connect in a real application. For the next step after this certification, see our AWS DevOps Engineer Professional guide to understand where the Developer Associate fits in your AWS certification roadmap.