Updated: May 30, 2018,
This exam is now out the beta program. Please find the latest blog article here.
Amazon has now released Beta to AWS Certified Developer at Associate Level and AWS Certified SysOps At Associate Level. The Associate Level was the only place that the AWS Certified Solutions Architect was currently available. Amazon is working hard to improve their certification program. They are adding certifications at an increasing rate. Below is the chart Amazon published on current and future certifications. As you can see, many more certifications are in the pipeline.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/
I was able to participate in the beta testing for AWS Certified Developer. This blog post shares my experiences about the certification. In a subsequent blog post, we will discuss the AWS certified Sysops.
Kryterion testing centers now offer the AWS Certified Developer Associate Level certification. The certification costs $75, which is less than the $150 for Solutions Architect. The beta certification has twice as many questions and results, but they are not available immediately. AWS states that results will be available up to 8-10 weeks after the beta date. You can also get a voucher to take the exam again if you fail the beta. Overall, it’s a great deal and I highly recommend giving the beta.
Below is a summary of the differences between AWS Certified Solutions Architect exams and AWS Certified Developer Beta tests.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect AWS Certified Developer BetaCost$150$75# of questions40-60100-120Time allocated80 min80 minCertification ResultImmediate ResultResult provided after certification comes out of beta (8-10 weeks)Passing percentage65%Not Published.Retake policyRetake after a month. You can attempt up to three times in a year. You must pay for each attempt. Beta can only be taken one time. You can fail beta. A free voucher will be given when the beta exam is out. Validity2 years from the date of certification2 year after certification comes out.
The AWS Developer Certification exam is for developers who have experience coding solutions on AWS infrastructure using AWS services. It has 40% weightage in “Designing and Developing” and 30% in “Deployment and Safety”.
This exam is very different from the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam had more emphasis on designing AWS applications. Therefore, 60% of the questions come from “Designing highly reliable, cost efficient and fault tolerant systems”.
Below are the top-level sections of AWS and my experience using these sections.
Topics for the AWS Certified Developer Associate level Exam
1. AWS Fundamentals (10%)
This section will test your knowledge of AWS Services. These questions will likely be answered if you have programed with AWS. It will be difficult to know all the services that are part of this exam. The AWS blueprint states that the certification includes the following services:
Core AWS Services (S3, IAM, RDS, EC2, ELB, EBS, VPC, etc.)
DynamoDB
Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Simple Notification Service (SNS).
Simple Workflow Service (SWS).
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS CloudFormation
2. Designing and developing (40%)
This section has the highest weightage, at 40%. This section will cover the architecture and use cases of all the AWS services. There may be questions about whether a service is feasible for a particular use or which service (or combination of services) is best suited to a given use. Another consideration is how to use a service the most efficiently. These questions could be:
What is the best DynamoDB indexing strategy for a given use case?
The best strategy to design S3 key space and/or ACLs for a specific type of dataset or use case is the following.
Consistent