AWS Certified Developer - Associate

The largest domain at 32% of scored content. Writing application code on AWS: architectural patterns and API design, developing and tuning AWS Lambda functions, and using data stores such as Amazon DynamoDB, S3, and messaging services (SQS/SNS/EventBridge) via AWS SDKs.

• Develop code for applications hosted on AWS (event-driven, microservices, and fanout patterns; create/maintain APIs; call AWS services with SDKs; messaging services and Amazon EventBridge)
• Develop code for AWS Lambda (configure memory/concurrency/timeout/runtime/handler/layers/triggers/destinations, access private VPC resources, handle event lifecycle and errors with DLQs, tune performance)
• Use data stores in application development (DynamoDB keys and indexing, query vs. scan and consistency models, data lifecycles, and caching services)

26% of scored content. Authentication and authorization with Amazon Cognito and IAM (federated access, bearer tokens, assuming roles), encryption at rest and in transit with AWS KMS, and managing sensitive data (secrets, masking, PII/PHI) in application code.

• Implement authentication and authorization (federated access with Amazon Cognito and IAM, bearer tokens, assume IAM roles, define permissions for IAM principals, fine-grained authorization)
• Implement encryption using AWS services (encryption at rest and in transit, client-side vs. server-side, use AWS KMS keys to encrypt/decrypt, key rotation)
• Manage sensitive data in application code (encrypt environment variables, secret management services, classify and sanitize PII/PHI, application-level data masking)

24% of scored content. Preparing application artifacts, testing in development environments, automating deployment testing, and deploying code with AWS CI/CD (CodePipeline/CodeBuild/CodeDeploy), IaC via AWS SAM and CloudFormation, and blue/green, canary, and rolling strategies.

• Prepare application artifacts and test in dev environments (manage dependencies and container images, code repositories, dev endpoints and API Gateway stages, deploy AWS SAM template updates)
• Automate deployment testing and implement IaC (Lambda/API Gateway test events, deploy AWS SAM and CloudFormation templates, Lambda aliases and container image tags for integration testing)
• Deploy code using AWS CI/CD services (commit to invoke build/test/deploy actions, orchestrated pipelines, rollbacks, blue/green, canary, and rolling deployment strategies)

The smallest domain at 18% of scored content. Root cause analysis (debugging, interpreting metrics/logs/traces), instrumenting code for observability with AWS X-Ray and Amazon CloudWatch, and optimizing applications through concurrency, caching, and resource tuning.

• Assist in a root cause analysis (debug code, interpret and query metrics/logs/traces, custom CloudWatch metrics with EMF, troubleshoot deployment failures using service logs)
• Instrument code for observability (effective and structured logging, emit custom metrics, add tracing annotations with AWS X-Ray, notification alerts and health checks)
• Optimize applications (define concurrency, profile performance, determine minimum memory/compute, application-level caching, analyze logs for bottlenecks)