Preparation journey for AWS Developer Associate Certification
My name is Sanjib Behera and I have passed 4 AWS certifications (all 3 Associate(s) & Practitioner), 1 GCE certification, 1 OCI Foundation certification & 1 Azure fundamentals certification. It took me 14 days to prepare for this exam but to be honest, 14 days are not enough to pass any cloud exam. In this blog I’ve broken down what all you need to take care of for the AWS Developer Certification.
I have the advantage of working in AWS projects from the last two years, so I have worked extensively on a few services like EC2/CloudWatch/VPC/S3/RDS/Cloudformation, etc. I had loads of hands-on for this AWS Developer certification using CLI/SDK during the last 14 days(Most of them sleepless nights), it was all worth it at last.
Additionally, I also have my AWS free tier account and have extensively worked on Lambda using SDK (boto3). I also work on IAC tools like Terraform & CloudFormation for spinning up AWS resources, which gives me a great perspective.
I do not work on all AWS services that is required to have the knowhow to pass this certificate.
Stephane Maarek’s Course On Udemy
I started reading for this exam from 11th May, 2020 via Stephane’s Udemy course for the Developer Associate exam, as I like his tutorials and was parallelly practicing via the CLI & SDK(boto3/python). My main focus area was to practice coding with simple scenarios using python SDK and play around the API calls via boto3 SDK especially for the services like EC2, DynamoDB, S3, RDS, ElastiCache, ECS, SQS, etc.
Make Use Of AWS FREE Tier
As I have my AWS free tier account, I played around with the AWS DevOps Service(s) extensively, ie. CodeCommit/CodeBuild/CodePipeline/CodeDeploy/CodeStar. I also ran some personal DevOps workloads on my laptop, where I use Jenkins as CI Tool and collaborate (CodeCommit, ECS, ECR, CodeDeploy) Jenkins plugins in some of the pipeline jobs. So all these experiences helped me answer all the questions related to the DevOps area in my exam.
Hands-on For Tutorials Is Must
Stephane Tutorial helped me in all those services, which I have never worked with like Elastic Beanstalk/SAM/Cognito/API Gateway/Kinesis/X-Ray. I recommend his Udemy tutorials should be taken for this certification and rest AWS certifications as well. Okay, so as I didn’t have experience in the services as mentioned above, I first watched the tutorial by Stephane, and then I again practiced these services on my AWS account. Hands-on was pretty vital for me, it was not only to get passed but to learn them quite well since my next target is the 2 AWS professional certificates.
Important Topics To Take Care Of
We need to learn the services API’s, of all the services which I have mentioned above, next is IAM roles required by the services (for example if Lambda only requires to read S3 bucket, which managed role is required by Lambda and so on and if you are required to create inline roles, you must know how to create them or have an idea about it). Also, there will be many security questions. I did not face any questions where there was a code given in the exam.
Most questions were API centric; hence it is essential to know what each API does and what purpose is solved by it? AWS always tries to trick you with two similar looking answers but having good hands-on, and you know about the service quite well, and if you read the question well, you immediately know which of the 2 is the correct answer. Like for example, if you know about DynamoDB LSI and GSI and their use-case, you can easily crack the question where both of these DynamoDB features will be given as answer options and hence if you read the question and understand the requirement well, you can select between the two.
Practice Scenario Based Questions
Last but not least, as this is developer certification, the deployment options, its use case and scenario which one is to be used in which use-case, it is imperative to understand, I got around six questions on this topic and again having the knowhow helped me to crack all these questions.
So this is it, daily dedicated sleepless 8 hours for 14 consecutive days after having dinner.
So this is my journey to pass the AWS Developer Associate Certificate.
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Author: Sanjib Behera is a cloud enthusiast with multiple cloud certifications. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
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