My path to AWS Developer - Associate Certification

What a year 2020 has been. I completed three AWS Certification and also selected as AWS Community Builder. I am Yogesh Sharma, and would like to share my experience with AWS certification for Developer Associate and how I prepared for it. I scored 959 out of 1000.

The AWS CDA (Developer Associate) certificate exam is one of Amazon’s three associate-level certifications for their cloud-based platform. As part of a certified developer, individuals must be able to:

1. Demonstrate an understanding of core AWS services, uses, and basic AWS architecture best practices.
2. Demonstrate proficiency in developing, deploying, and debugging cloud-based applications using AWS

AWS certification allows the developer to confirm his qualification and skills in working with AWS services. And the preparation process itself provides additional experience in working with AWS services. But besides all of this, you also get knowledge about architectural patterns that can be applied anywhere else, how solutions are built in the cloud, their limitations and problems.

Why Should one take the exam?

If you are a developer and want to skill up regarding databases, containers, and full-stack development this exam is for you. This exam really tests your knowledge on how to do authentication with your web apps, computing such as running applications on virtual servers, running serverless applications, Implement caching for scaling and performance, different types of storage, etc. You will understand the different aspects of software engineering as well such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Development, and Continuous Delivery.

About the exam

Please follow the content outline provided by AWS:

https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-dev-associate/AWS-Certified-Developer-Associate_Exam-Guide.pdf

AWS Provided Material

1. Check AWS CDA Page for overview, details and scheduling exam.
2. Go through AWS Exam Readiness Free course this comes straight from the creators of the exam. Also check out all the relevant topic training on https://www.aws.training/

Free Courses

1. ExamPro Developer Associate Exam by Andrew Brown Part 1
   ExamPro Developer Associate Exam by Andrew Brown Part 2
   The AWS Certified Developer - Associate examination is intended for individuals who perform a development role and have experience maintaining an AWS-based application.

2. Learning Path

3. AWS Cheat Sheet

Paid Courses

1. Stéphane Maarek- I found this the best course (as of June 2020). Around 30 hours long course which might cost you ~14$

2. ACloudGuru

3. Adrian Cantrill

AWS WhitePapers

Serverless Architectures with AWS Lambda ||
AWS Well-Architected Framework || Running Containerized Microservices on AWS || Practicing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery on AWS Accelerating Software Delivery with DevOps || Microservices on AWS || Optimizing Enterprise Economics with Serverless Architectures || Blue/Green Deployments on AWS

AWS FAQs

Amazon Simple Queue Service || Amazon DynamoDB || Amazon ElastiCache || Amazon Kinesis || AWS Lambda || Amazon API Gateway || AWS Elastic Beanstalk || AWS Identity and Access Management || AWS Key Management Service

Practice Questions

The practice exams can help you with time management since each exam has a set amount of time to finish it. After you've taken a few different practice exams and scored consistently above the passing level, you might be ready to take the real exam.

1. AWS provides Practice Questions to give the flavor of real exam and we all can validate our learning by attempting that. It was $20 for 20 questions (and after passing the actual certification exam we can get a free practice exam voucher that can be applied in our next practice exam). It is definitely not 'A MUST' exercise but it gave me the confidence.
2. Tutorials Dojo offers about 335 practice questions ( 5 sets where each set has 65-questions plus 10 diagnostic questions) that are explicitly focused on the relevant topics for this exam. It is also available in Udemy.(15$)

Important Tips

1. Study, Understand, Practice, Repeat!
2. Reserve time in your calendar regularly to study and to practice. Take breaks.
3. Create your own flashcards and Write down notes
4. Read blog posts or books
5. Watch Re:Invent videos
6. Schedule your exam with adequate time to study beforehand (2+ weeks)
7. Share what you learn- the best ways to reinforce what you've learned is to share it with other people. That could be in the form of a tweet, Linkedin post, blog post, #100DaysOfCloud etc.
8. Read the AWS FAQs
9. Take practice exams

It's show time

Register and go for the glory! The exam is $150 and you can take it from your home.

After the exam- Pass/Fail Status will come immediately after you complete the exam. But, it takes some time to get the actual score in your AWS certification account. Once it appears in the account you can download the digital badge, pdf certificate, exam transcript, etc. You will get 50% off your next AWS exam as one of the benefits.

I wish you the best of luck! If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to leave a response and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.