AWS Certified Developer - Associate Certification
Recently I passed the AWS Developer Associate certification. Since then, a lot of people at work and otherwise have approached me on how to get started and the resources I referred during the preparation for the exam. AWS is vast, and it can quickly get overwhelming and does require to put in a lot of work if you are not familiar with cloud technologies. With this motivation, I have written this post. Without diving too deep into the technicalities, I have tried to keep my experience of the certification journey short and straightforward. I hope this is helpful. Any feedback is much appreciated.
About the AWS Certification Developer - Associate Exam
AWS Certified Developer - Associate certification is one of the certifications among the various certification paths laid out by AWS. Once you are a certified AWS developer, you become eligible for AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional certification.
With certification comes many freebies from AWS; one of which is a discount coupon for your professional level certification.
The certification is valid for three years. It can be renewed either by taking recertification exams or getting a professional level certification depending on your certification path.
More on the certification is available here:
https://aws.amazon.com/certification/?nav=tc&loc=3
https://aws.amazon.com/training/path-developing/
The caveat
AWS does not provide the cut-off to clear the certification. It is not known how AWS decides the cut-off, but my best guess would be that it is based on the number and performance of certification takers on any given day/period. As the cut-off is unknown, you must always target to score as much as you can during the exam without targeting any specific score, an important aspect to keep in mind during preparation and while appearing for the exam.
Preparing for the certification
First thing you need to do is to get yourself familiarized with the blueprint of the exam. Below document should give you a fair idea of what to expect in the exam:
https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-dev-associate/AWS_Certified_Developer_Associate_Updated_June_2018_Exam_Guide_v1.3.pdf
There is a lot of material available on the Internet to help you prepare for the certification. In my experience, the best way to get started is to spend some time on the resources AWS has to offer, namely, FAQs, white papers, case studies. However, I would only recommend this if you already have some development experience with AWS.
You can follow links to the white papers and FAQs recommended for the Developer certification at https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certification-prep/.
If you have just begun on AWS, my recommendation would be to look for various video guides on AWS certifications available on the platforms such as Udemy, Pluralsight, acloudguru, to name a few. This way, you can avoid getting overwhelmed by the vast ocean of knowledge that is AWS. But as you gain confidence in your understanding of AWS, don't forget to visit at least the white papers and FAQs recommended for the certification.
AWS Training and Certification Library
AWS offers a lot of free content on developing with AWS. The best part about the Training and Certification library is that you can filter the material by technology, role, and skill level. It is an invaluable resource available free of cost. You can access the library at https://www.aws.training/LearningLibrary?filters=classification%3A58&search=&tab=view_all.
acloudguru – https://acloud.guru/
I followed acloudguru tutorials. Their tutorials start from the very basics of AWS without presuming any prior AWS knowledge on your part. The tutorials will help you get the hands-on AWS experience through easy to follow exercises. At the end of each unit, there is a quiz. The tutorial also includes several mini/mega quizzes as well, which can help in evaluating your preparation for the exam. While I found the tutorials to be a little slow paced as I already had some experience with AWS, nevertheless, I appreciate the effort put in by the folks at acoudguru as the tutorial did help me to streamline my preparation and put things into perspective.
The platform also has an active developer community which can help you with any doubts or problems you run into while going through the exercises. People also share their certification experiences and their preparation strategies that could help you strategize yourself.
Apart from certification guides, the platform also provides regular updates in the AWS eco-system and tutorials targeting specific technologies in AWS, such as serverless development, DynamoDB.
Their tutorials are available on Udemy also. Sales on Udemy are a good way of purchasing these tutorials at a lower cost. You can refer to this link: https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-developer-associate/.
You can port the above tutorial to acloudguru easily by following this guide:https://help.acloud.guru/hc/en-us/articles/115001827014-How-do-I-migrate-courses-from-Udemy-.
Timeline
In my experience, the preparation can take up a better part of 5-6 months, depending on your prior knowledge and expertise with AWS. So it is crucial not to lose focus during this period as anything otherwise could delay your plans.
It is said that theory is no substitute for practice and it could not be more true for AWS certifications. The training is the key. So practice as much as you can. AWS offers free-tier for many of their service offerings for the first twelve months of your AWS account subscription. Plus a lot of the services have free-usage limits that should be enough to cover your AWS account cost during your preparation even beyond the free-tier.
Get started here: https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup#/start
