First of all, congratulations on choosing this book and beginning your journey towards earning AWS Certified Developer – Associate certification. As the saying goes, a good beginning is half done. You have set a target and taken the first step towards it. If you follow the instructions in this book, it will certainly help you complete the certification exam.
To start with, let's first discuss a number of certifications offered by AWS and see where the AWS Certified Developer – Associate certification stands with respect to other AWS certifications.
AWS mainly provides certifications for four roles: AWS Cloud practitioner, architect, developer, and operations. As you can see in the AWS certification path section in the following diagram, AWS Cloud Practitioner is a foundation course for the architect, developer, and operations roles. The foundation course is the same for every role-based certification path. The AWS Certified Developer – Associate certification falls under the developer role. The AWS Cloud Practitioner certification is good to have, but it is not mandatory for either of the associate-level certifications. Each of the chapters in this book begins with foundational knowledge of the relevant service and subsequently gets into the details of all the topics that are required to pass the Developer Associate exam.
The following diagram describes the AWS certification path for all the certifications with AWS:
After passing the AWS Certified Solution Architect – Associate exam, you can take the AWS Certified Solution Architect – Professional exam. Similarly, after passing the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam, you can take the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam. The same goes for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam. The professional-level path for Developer and SysOps remains the same. AWS also provides specialty certifications for advanced networking, big data, and security. You can take a specialty certification exam only if you have at least one of the role-based certifications, either at associate or professional level.
Each of these certification exams has its own difficulty level. The following diagram indicates the difficulty level of each of the certification exams and highlights where the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam stands in terms of difficulty:
As you begin your journey towards the certification, you may have a number of questions running through your mind. This chapter covers a number of such questions, the ones that are frequently asked by beginners. Let's see how you should start preparing for the exam.
Amazon publishes an official blueprint for each of its certification exams. The blueprint explains the scope of the exam, the prerequisites for taking the exam, and the knowledge required to pass the exam. The blueprint may change from time to time, and you should look out for the latest copy of the blueprint for the exam from Amazon.
At the time of writing this chapter, the official blueprint for the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam is available at these URLs:
- Short URL: https://goo.gl/j2dBVY.
- Original URL: https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-dev-associate/AWS_Certified_Developer_Associate_Updated_June_2018_Exam_Guide_v1.3.pdf.
The exam scope is divided into five domains, as shown in the following table, with their respective weighting in the exam:
|
Serial no. |
Domain |
% weighting in the exam |
|
1 |
Domain 1: Deployment |
22% |
|
2 |
Domain 2: Security |
26% |
|
3 |
Domain 3: Development with AWS services |
30% |
|
4 |
Domain 4: Refactoring |
10% |
|
5 |
Domain 5: Monitoring and troubleshooting |
12% |
|
Total |
|
100% |
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