AWS DVA-C02 FAQ for exam format, topics, prep strategy, practice, and common candidate traps.
DVA-C02 is AWS’s current Developer - Associate exam. It validates whether you can develop, secure, deploy, and troubleshoot AWS cloud applications with the judgment expected from an application developer, not from a pure infrastructure administrator.
According to the current AWS guide, the target candidate should have 1 year or more of hands-on experience developing and maintaining applications on AWS.
As of April 11, 2026, the current AWS guide still lists:
| Exam fact | Current official value |
|---|---|
| Duration | 130 minutes |
| Questions | 65 |
| Response types | Multiple choice and multiple response |
| Passing score | 720 scaled score |
AWS also says the exam uses a compensatory scoring model, so you do not need to pass each domain separately.
No. The current guide lists only multiple-choice and multiple-response questions.
That does not mean hands-on work is optional. It means hands-on understanding is tested through scenario judgment:
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| Development with AWS Services | 32% |
| Security | 26% |
| Deployment | 24% |
| Troubleshooting and Optimization | 18% |
That means this is not only a Lambda exam and not only a security exam. It is a balanced developer-on-AWS exam, with the biggest weight still on building and integrating application behavior correctly.
Not in the architecture-exam sense. You do need practical developer-level networking awareness:
But DVA-C02 is still mainly about building and operating application paths, not designing enterprise network topology.
Do not memorize everything. Memorize the high-confusion defaults:
| Weak area | Why people miss it |
|---|---|
| async behavior | retries, DLQs, visibility timeout, and idempotency blur together |
| security boundaries | candidates mix IAM permissions, KMS permissions, and resource policies |
| test strategy | unit tests, integration tests, staged endpoints, and mock dependencies get blurred |
| observability | logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and health checks get treated as interchangeable |
| deployment safety | candidates know the service names but not why one rollout path is safer |
| Exam | What it rewards most |
|---|---|
SAA-C03 |
architecture trade-offs across many AWS services |
DVA-C02 |
application behavior, event-driven design, security boundaries, deployment safety, and debugging |
If your strength is writing and troubleshooting cloud apps, DVA-C02 will usually feel more natural than SAA-C03.
If you want the smallest hands-on baseline that still changes how you answer questions, do this:
That is enough to stop answering from buzzwords alone.
Use a narrow loop:
In the last week, compress instead of expanding:
2 timed mixed sets.If you still confuse SQS vs EventBridge, role permissions vs KMS permissions, or stage testing vs production rollout, keep drilling. Those are expensive misses.
Trust the live AWS sources in Resources first:
Those are stronger than old blog summaries, stale PDFs copied elsewhere, or generic prep lists.