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AWS DVA-C02 Guide: AWS Certified Developer - Associate

AWS DVA-C02 exam guide covering Lambda, APIs, event-driven apps, and deployment decisions.

This guide targets AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02), AWS’s current associate-level developer certification for people who build, test, deploy, and troubleshoot cloud applications on AWS. The exam rewards clean judgment about event-driven patterns, Lambda behavior, IAM boundaries, CI/CD workflows, observability, and the small operational details that make application code reliable in production.

Lambda: AWS serverless compute service for event-driven code execution without managing servers directly.

IAM role: AWS identity that applications or AWS services assume so they can call other AWS services without hard-coded long-term credentials.

Idempotent: Safe to run repeatedly without creating inconsistent duplicates or unintended side effects.

At a glance

Exam fact Current official value
Level Associate
Duration 130 minutes
Format 65 multiple-choice or multiple-response questions
Passing score 720 scaled score
Validity 3 years
Typical next step SOA-C03, SAA-C03, or a deeper specialty-aligned AWS path

AWS positions DVA-C02 for candidates with roughly 1+ year of hands-on experience building and maintaining AWS applications. The current exam guide breaks the scored content into four weighted domains, and this online guide now follows that structure directly:

What strong answers usually do

  • classify the stem into the right lane before choosing a service
  • separate application logic from platform integration details such as retries, dead-letter handling, and permissions
  • prefer managed event-driven building blocks unless the scenario clearly needs lower-level infrastructure control
  • treat observability and troubleshooting as part of the application design, not as post-deployment cleanup
  • choose the narrowest secure access pattern that still keeps the application maintainable

How to use this guide

  1. Start with the study plan if you want a realistic weekly sequence.
  2. Work the four weighted domain chapters in order, starting with Development with AWS Services and Security.
  3. Use the cheat sheet after you already understand the chapter logic.
  4. Use the cheat sheet when API, Lambda, event, IAM, deployment, and troubleshooting choices start to blur.
  5. Keep the glossary open when messaging, IAM, KMS, and deployment terminology begins to blur together.
  6. Use the resources page to stay anchored to the current AWS exam guide and primary service documentation.
  7. Use the FAQ for exam-day rules, final-scope judgment, and last-week review decisions.

Coverage map against the current exam guide

Domain Weight What to study first
1. Development with AWS Services 32% 1.1 Application Patterns, APIs, Messaging & Integrations, 1.2 Lambda Config, Events, VPC Access & Errors
2. Security 26% 2.1 Federated Access, IAM Roles & App Authorization, 2.2 Encryption at Rest, In Transit & Key Management
3. Deployment 24% 3.1 Packaging, Dependencies, Repositories & Environment Config, 3.4 CI/CD, Deployment Strategies, Runtime Config & Rollbacks
4. Troubleshooting and Optimization 18% 4.1 Root Cause Analysis with Metrics, Logs & Traces, 4.3 Concurrency, Caching, Messaging Filters & Performance Tuning

If two answers both sound right

For DVA-C02, the stronger answer is usually the one that stays in the developer lane:

  • choose the option that fixes application behavior before one that redesigns the entire architecture
  • choose the option that uses an existing AWS managed integration before a larger custom platform build
  • choose the option that narrows permissions and secrets exposure instead of embedding credentials in code or config
  • choose the option that reduces blast radius during deployment and rollback instead of maximizing change speed alone

In this section

Revised on Sunday, May 10, 2026
AIF-C01
AIP-C01