Introduction

Immediately after passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam I began preparing for the next cert on my hit list, the AWS Certified Developer – Associate. I had heard mixed reviews about this one – some who had taken the exam a couple of years back told me it was the easiest of the three associate exams, requiring just a further two weeks of study to pass. Others who had taken the exam more recently told me the complete opposite. In fact during the course into from A Cloud Guru, Ryan Kroonenberg actually states that he thinks the Developer exam is the most difficult of the three… Who to believe? Well I suppose there was only one way to find out!

The Exam (according to AWS)

The first place I usually check when taking any exam is the exam guide. Regardless of what training material is out there, it’s important for you to know the exam objectives yourself and be comfortable with them. The exam guide and an overview of the exam domains can be found below: https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-dev-associate/AWS-Certified-Developer-Associate_Exam-Guide.pdf.

Domain 1: Deployment

  • 1.1 Deploy written code in AWS using existing CI/CD pipelines, processes, and patterns
  • 1.2 Deploy applications using Elastic Beanstalk
  • 1.3 Prepare the application deployment package to be deployed to AWS
  • 1.4 Deploy serverless applications

Domain 2: Security

  • 2.1 Make authenticated calls to AWS services
  • 2.2 Implement encryption using AWS services
  • 2.3 Implement application authentication, and authorization

Domain 3: Development with AWS Services

  • 3.1 Write code for serverless applications
  • 3.2 Translate functional requirements into application design
  • 3.3 Implement application design into application code
  • 3.4 Write code that interacts with AWS services by using APIs, SDKs, and AWS CLI

Domain 4: Refactoring

  • 4.1 Optimize application to best use AWS services and features
  • 4.2 Migrate existing application code to run on AWS

Domain 5: Monitoring and Troubleshooting

  • 5.1 Write code that can be monitored
  • 5.2 Perform root cause analysis on faults found in testing or production

Study

I found that the momentum after passing the Architect exam really helped propel me forward towards passing the Developer exam. Previously I had always made the mistake of taking a break after passing any exam, a reward for my efforts over the previous months. It can be a dangerous trap to fall into however, one week becomes two, two weeks becomes a month and then before you know it it’s been 3 month since you last studied. The effort it then takes to get back into any sort of study routine can be soul destroying. It’s like anything really else that takes commitment isn’t? Whether it is going back to the gym after the Christmas holidays or perhaps even picking up your diet again after the Christmas holidays, it can take some real grit and determination to get through the first days or weeks. Studying is no different and I have seen a huge difference in my progress by just keeping that momentum going.

There is also a huge amount of overlap between the three associate exams, I would estimate that somewhere between 50-60% of content on the Developer exam is shared with the Architect exam. This probably gave me a false and undeserved sense of confidence. I figured that being in DevOps, most of the additional content in the Developer exam would be familiar to me and therefor after passing the Associate exam, this one should have been a breeze. As it turned out, that wasn’t quite the case.

But before we get into that, let me talk a little bit about my study resources. Sadly Adrian Cantrill did not have a training course released at the time of me taking the exam. It was a great shame for me as personally I feel that Adrian has the most complete and in-depth study resources for the Solutions Architect – Associate and Professional exams. I am pleased to announce though that as of October 2020, Adrian will start work on courses for both the Developer and SysOps exams. So if you are reading this towards to the end of 2020 (or later), Adrian should be your first port of call for training material. Stephane Maarek also produces fantastic AWS training material so in the absence of Adrian, I know that Stephane’s course would be my primary study resource. His course can be found on Udemy here: https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-developer-associate-dva-c01/. It comes in at a hefty 30 hours which I believe is almost double the length of the equivalent A Cloud Guru course. The first half of the course does compromise much of the same content as the Architect exam – IAM, EC2, ELB, ASG, S3, VPC, RDS etc etc etc… For the second half of the course you start getting into the real bread and butter of the Developer exam – AWS CLI, ECS/ECR/Fargate, Beanstalk, CI/CD, CloudFormation, Lambda, API Gateway and more.

I did think about skipping the first half of the course and just getting on with the Developer specific content but after a bit of internal deliberation, I deciding that I would watch all of the videos in the order intended. Covering some of the content from the Architect exam would only solidify that knowledge and would ultimately help me obtain another pass on exam day. The first 50% of the course didn’t take me long to cover, perhaps 10 days give or take. This included following along with all of the hands on labs too. As far as I can recall there wasn’t anything taxing about these labs, with my work experience and previous studies it was all fairly straightforward. Reaching the halfway stage coincided perfectly with my summer holiday. I have been from the lucky few who were able to travel abroad this year and given the current circumstances surrounding COVID, I thought it would be prudent of me to full enjoy these two weeks off and not put too much emphasis on study (although I did study on the plane…!)

Actually getting back into my study routine after my two weeks off was something I was quite looking forward too. I could feel my next AWS certification within reach and was adamant that I wouldn’t lose my momentum. Jumping back into Stephane’s course at the halfway point meant that I was perfectly placed to begin the Developer specific content. First up was ECS/ECR and Fargate. I thought I would breeze through these sections of the course but I could immediately tell that with the move onto the Developer content came quite a jump difficulty. It seemed to go that little bit deeper technically and focused less on the high level architectural requirements of my previous exam. Despite the challenge I enjoyed this part of the study. It felt nice to be getting hands on more and more while following PowerPoints less and less. I can’t emphasis enough how critical hands on experience is for this exam. Personally without my work experience and following along with the labs, I don’t think I would have been able to pass first time. Stephane’s course continues very much in the same vein, covering all of the key topics and the concepts for the exam. If I were to pick up two topics that came up the most in the exam, it would have to be Lambda and CloudFormation.

TBC…