In today’s tech landscape, AWS is one of the leading players in the cloud market. As developers, many of us have engaged with various AWS services. After utilizing diverse AWS services for the past four years, I successfully passed the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate” exam.
More recently, I achieved another certification tailored for developer-focused roles: the “AWS Certified Developer – Associate“. I’m eager to share my exam preparation blueprint to make the process impactful and beneficial for aspiring candidates.
For developers seeking to showcase their skills with a badge, the “AWS Certified Developer – Associate” certification holds significant relevance. Some might argue in favor of starting with certificates like “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate” or “AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner”. However, based on my experience, the AWS CSAA certification is more oriented towards infrastructure development, while AWS CCP caters to non-technical roles.
In this guide, I’ll focus on two critical aspects:
- A blueprint for the preparation
- Make the preparation impactful, easy, and fun
Strategic Planning for Cloud Certification
While my approach is personalized, consider adapting the content and study mediums to suit your learning style:
Video Course: I found value in courses by Steven Maarek on Udemy. However, the challenge lies in maintaining focus during video content. For me, taking notes and parallel reading aided my comprehension.
Mock Tests: Familiarize yourself with exam formats using mock tests. I utilized resources from Tutorials Dojo, Wizlab, Steven Maarek, and Neal Davis. Tutorials Dojo offers scenarios close to the real exam and provides detailed explanations for both correct and incorrect answers. Review modes in Tutorials Dojo and Wizlab tests enable immediate assessment of answers.
Impactful Preparation
Passing the CDA exam is feasible with minimal hands-on experience, but it’s not recommended. Lack of practical exposure can make the exam excessively challenging and confusing. To make the preparation engaging, interesting, and effective:
- Build some pet projects using AWS services
- Deep dive when you are using the AWS services in the client application
Pet Projects: Embrace serverless architecture for your projects. It’s not only fun but also cost-effective (often free) and aligns well with a developer’s existing knowledge. I dedicated substantial time to building serverless REST APIs using various AWS services:
- API Gateway (utilizing caching, staging variables, and diverse deployment methods)
- Lambda (integrating source and destination mapping with S3 and API Gateway)
- DynamoDB (exploring caching, indexing, encryption, and streaming capabilities)
- X-ray and CloudWatch (for application debugging)
- CodePipeline (working with Elastic Beanstalk and Serverless Infrastructure)
- ECS and Fargate
- SAM and CloudFormation
- Non-Serverless tools (Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, Load Balancer, and Auto Scaling)
Surprisingly, these services we used in the pet projects, cover over 50% of the exam syllabus and are commonly used by most developers, albeit potentially through different vendors or open-source tools.
To recapitulate, Preparing for the AWS CDA exam requires dedication, a mix of theoretical understanding, and practical hands-on experience. Feel free to let me know of any queries and best wishes for your cloud journey. You can contact iXora Solution expert teams for any consultations or coordination with expert teams for any consultations or coordination from here.
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