This blog was last updated on 30 May 2018.
AWS Certification can be divided into three levels: Foundation Level (Associate Level), Associate Level (Professional Level). The Associate level can be further divided into three tracks. The Solutions Architect track is intended for aspiring architects. SysOps Engineer track focuses on engineers responsible for maintaining the website’s uptime. The Developer track targets those who are eager to use AWS services via APIs. Watch our video to learn more about the hierarchy of certifications offered by AWS.
Source: aws.amazon.com
I passed the AWS Certified Developer Certification Examination and am sharing my experiences with the certification in this blog article. In a future blog post, we will discuss the AWS certified Sysops.
PSI examination centers now offer the AWS Certified Developer Associate Level Certification. The certification costs $150. The certification is composed of many questions. Results are not immediately available.
Below is a summary of the differences between the two versions of AWS Certified Developer exams.
AWS Certified Developer- Associate (New, Released June 2018) AWS Certification Developer- Associate (Old) Cost$150$150# questions6555Time allotted130 min80 minCertification resultNot Immediate ResultsImmediate ResultsPassing percentageNot PublishedNot PublicatedPercentage weight for DomainsDeployment 22%
Security 26%
AWS Services for Development 30%
Refactoring 10%
Monitoring and Troubleshooting 12%
AWS Fundamentals 10%
Designing and developing 40%
Security and deployment 30%
Debugging 20%
Validity2 years after the date certification2 years after the date certificationRetake policyRetake after one month. You can attempt up to three times in a single year. You will be charged each time. Retake after a month. You can try up to three times in a year. Each time, you will be charged.
The AWS Developer Certification exam is for developers who have developed code solutions that run on AWS infrastructure using AWS services. It has 40% weight for “Designing and Developing” and 30 for “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. I have also shared my experience with 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 is 40% in weight. This section will require you to understand 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 particular 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 keyspaces and ACLs is to use a specific type of dataset and use case.
Each of these services has a consistent model. S3 objects that are older than 3 years are eventually consistent, while DynamoDB offers consistent read options
There are many limitations to the Services. S3 has limitations such as how many buckets you can have.