AWS Developer Certification & Interview
Prep Guide
🧭 Overview
This document is designed to help you prepare for the AWS Certified Developer – Associate
exam and handle advanced AWS interview questions as a developer.
✅ Topics for Certification Exam (DVA-C02)
1. Core AWS Services
● Compute: EC2, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, ECS/Fargate
● Storage: S3, EBS, EFS, Glacier
● Database: DynamoDB, RDS, Aurora
2. Security & Identity
● IAM: Users, Roles, Policies, MFA
● KMS: Key management, encryption
● Cognito: User pools, identity pools
3. Developer Tools & CI/CD
● CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline
● Cloud9 IDE
4. Monitoring & Logging
● CloudWatch (metrics, logs, alarms)
● X-Ray (distributed tracing)
5. Serverless & Event-Driven
● Lambda (triggers, permissions, concurrency)
● Step Functions
● EventBridge
6. Messaging Services
● SQS: Queuing and decoupling
● SNS: Pub/Sub notifications
7. Application Integration
● API Gateway
● AppSync (GraphQL)
● EventBridge vs SNS/SQS
8. Infrastructure as Code
● CloudFormation
● AWS CDK (optional)
9. SDKs & Dev Tools
● AWS SDK (Node.js, Python, etc.)
● CLI & Boto3 basics
10. Best Practices
● Scalability, reliability, cost optimization
● Serverless design patterns
● Idempotency and error handling
🧠 Advanced Interview Questions & Answers
Q1. How does AWS Lambda scale under load?
A: Lambda creates a new container per concurrent request. You can control it with Reserved
Concurrency and Provisioned Concurrency.
Q2. Explain the difference between SNS and SQS.
A: SNS is Pub/Sub (push), while SQS is queuing (pull). Use SNS for fan-out, SQS for
decoupling systems.
Q3. How would you reduce Lambda cold starts?
A: Use Provisioned Concurrency, keep package size small, avoid VPC unless needed.
Q4. How to secure API Gateway endpoints?
A: Use Cognito, IAM roles, Lambda authorizers, API keys, and WAF for layered security.
Q5. Difference: Elastic Beanstalk vs ECS/Fargate?
A: Beanstalk is easier for web apps, ECS/Fargate is better for microservices with fine-grained
control.
Q6. What are DynamoDB’s consistency models?
A: Strongly consistent and eventually consistent reads. Choose based on data criticality.
Q7. How does Lambda handle retries with SQS trigger?
A: Retries up to 2 times. Use DLQ for failures. Add idempotency in code.
Q8. How to ensure zero-downtime deployment?
A: Use Blue/Green or Canary deployments with CodeDeploy or Lambda versions and aliases.
Q9. How to store and access secrets in AWS?
A: Use Secrets Manager or SSM Parameter Store with encryption.
Q10. Design a scalable serverless REST API.
A:
● API Gateway (endpoints)
● Lambda (backend)
● DynamoDB (storage)
● Cognito (auth)
● CloudWatch (logs)
📘 Resources
Courses:
● Udemy: Stephane Maarek – AWS Developer Associate
● AWS Skill Builder: Free & paid training
Practice Tests:
● Tutorials Dojo
● Whizlabs
AWS Docs:
● AWS Well-Architected Framework
● AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB Docs
Hands-on Labs:
● Free Tier AWS
● qwiklabs.com
📝 Exam Info
● 65 questions, multiple choice
● Duration: 130 minutes
● Cost: $150 USD
● Passing Score: ~720/1000
💡 Final Tips
● Practice on AWS Free Tier
● Focus on understanding real-world use cases
● Build projects: Serverless API, CI/CD pipelines, Event-driven workflows
● Understand how services connect together
