AWS Certified Developer Associate - Exam Review

I Passed

I passed the AWS Certified Developer - Associate certification.

I wrote about falling for AWS back in September, and after three months of steady studying, I took the exam at year’s end. Result: pass.

Honestly, I expected to fail. A lot of the questions were more ambiguous than I anticipated. Walking out of the exam, I was convinced I’d blown it. Turns out I hadn’t.

Why Get Certified?

I don’t think a certification by itself proves competence. Plenty of people are great without one, and plenty of certified folks still struggle in practice.

But my reason for studying was a bit different.

AWS has so many services that I was just poking around without any structure. I’d search for whatever I needed and use it, but the big picture never came together. Cert prep forces you to survey all the services systematically — and that felt like a worthwhile way to learn.

It worked. During prep, I kept discovering services I didn’t even know existed.

About the Developer Associate Exam

AWS offers several certifications. Developer Associate evaluates your ability to leverage AWS from a developer’s perspective.

Key domains:

Deployment: CI/CD pipelines with CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline
Security: Authentication, authorization, and encryption via IAM, Cognito, KMS
Development: Core services like DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, SNS
Refactoring: Strategies for migrating existing applications to AWS
Monitoring: Debugging and observability with CloudWatch, X-Ray

The exam is 130 minutes, 65 questions. Mix of multiple choice and multiple select.

How I Studied

Here’s the approach that worked for me:

Phase 1 - Online Course

I picked one comprehensive course and watched it end to end. An English course with subtitles. This helped build the overall mental framework.

Phase 2 - Hands-On Practice

Lectures alone don’t stick. You have to get into the AWS Console and actually build things. There’s plenty you can do within the free tier, so I practiced extensively.

Phase 3 - Practice Exams

This was the most important part. You need to get comfortable with the actual question style. AWS offers official practice exams, and there are several third-party options too. I focused my review on questions I got wrong.

Total study time was about three months. Not every day — roughly 1-2 hours on weekdays, a bit more on weekends.

Exam Experience

I took the exam online from home. Webcam on, nothing on the desk, alone in the room. A proctor monitors via webcam.

The questions are more scenario-based than expected. “In this situation, which service would you use?” Having actual hands-on experience gives you a real edge over pure memorization.

Time is generous. 130 minutes for 65 questions works out to 2 minutes each, but most take under a minute. Flag the tricky ones and come back to them.

After Passing

Passing felt satisfying, but honestly, “I know AWS now” couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, I became more aware of how much I don’t know.

What definitely improved is having a mental map of AWS services. Before, I’d search on the fly whenever I needed something. Now I’m starting to develop an instinct for which service fits which problem.

Next target: Solutions Architect Associate. But that’ll probably be a “starting next month” thing again.