I’ve been working as a Java developer for two years and my company is moving all our microservices to the cloud. I’m trying to decide which AWS certification will help me the most with Lambda, DynamoDB, and CI/CD pipelines. Is the Developer Associate actually focused on coding, or is it more about learning the specific API calls and limitations of the AWS SDKs for different languages?
3 answers
As a fellow Java dev, I found the Developer Associate (DVA-C02) extremely relevant. It isn't a "coding" test in the sense of writing logic, but it tests your knowledge of how to interact with services via the SDK. You’ll need to know things like X-Ray for debugging, how to handle throttling in API Gateway, and the specifics of DynamoDB indexing. It was quite a challenge when I took it back in 2023, but it immediately improved how I wrote our deployment scripts and handled environment variables in our serverless functions. Highly recommended for your role.
Did you find that the exam focused heavily on serverless, or was there still a significant amount of content regarding EC2 and traditional load balancing?
It's great for learning the shared responsibility model from a dev perspective. Definitely focus on the deployment section, especially CodeCommit and CodeDeploy.
I agree with Kenneth. The CI/CD portion is probably the most valuable part for any backend engineer looking to automate their workflow in a cloud environment.
It’s very serverless-heavy now, Sean. You’ll see a lot of questions on Lambda configuration, SQS queues, and SNS notifications. While EC2 is mentioned, the core focus is definitely on modern, decoupled architectures. If your company is moving towards microservices, these are exactly the tools you’ll be using every day, so the study material is actually very practical for on-the-job tasks.