My Learning Experience with AWS Developer Associate DVA-C02

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Needs for certifications are always judgemental since not many required certifications to prove their excellence and the meaning differs between role to role. But certifications are fact checks for our technical exposure to engineering topics and I had such fact checks working well to understand where we reached and what else needs to be learnt part of this learning curve since last fifteen years.

After completing SAA-C03, thought a better option to brush the basics through DVA-C02 since this exam is useful on learning wide range of development fundamentals across AWS Cloud.

How to Learn?

Suggesting training videos and classroom tutorials are not that much useful until hands-on to the particular technology to make use of it for a project work. Created a channel in pluralsight to have 60+ Labs (from cloud guru) to practice by running different services at AWS cloud for this exam DVA-C02

Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect-Vince Lombardi

ACloudGuru + Pluralsight Channel: Link

Interesting Topics

Learning through DVA-C02 made me touching across interesting use cases in following key topics of AWS cloud application development.

Here’s a brief overview of some highly useful topics to learn (+useful for exam) and highly relevant to AWS applications when working in such ecosystem:

AWS Lambda

1. Memory: Controls the memory allocated to Lambda, affecting performance and cost.
2. Dead Letter Queue (DLQ): Captures failed events that Lambda can't process, helping with debugging.
3. Resource-Based Policy: Allows access to Lambda functions by other AWS resources (like S3, API Gateway).
4. Lambda@Edge: Deploys Lambda functions to CloudFront edge locations for low-latency processing.
5. VPC Access Execution Role Policy: Grants Lambda permissions to access resources inside a VPC.
6. Lambda Layer: Reusable code or libraries that can be included in Lambda functions.
7. Event Source Mapping: Links a Lambda function to an event source like SQS, DynamoDB Streams, etc.
8. Provisioned Concurrency: Prepares a specific number of Lambda instances to reduce cold start times.

AWS CloudFormation

1. SAM Syntax in CloudFormation: A simplified syntax for defining serverless applications in CloudFormation templates.
2. ChangeSets: Previews changes to be applied in CloudFormation stacks to avoid unwanted modifications.
3. SSM Dynamic Reference: Dynamically retrieves sensitive information like Secrets Manager secrets during stack creation.
4. Drift Detection: Identifies configuration changes made outside of CloudFormation.

AWS Code Services

1. CodeArtifact: A repository for managing artifacts, used with CodeBuild for CI/CD pipelines.
2. CodeBuild, CodeCommit: CodeBuild automates the build process, and CodeCommit is a source control service.
3. AWS Copilot: Simplifies deployment of containerized applications to ECS using CodeCommit & CI/CD pipelines.

AWS CloudFront

1. Origin Protocol Policy: Determines whether CloudFront communicates with the origin server over HTTP or HTTPS.

AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management)

1. Federated Roles: Allows users from external identity providers (like Active Directory) to access AWS resources.
2. Roles and Policies: Defines permissions and access for resources.
3. Execution Roles: Grants Lambda, EC2, or other services the necessary permissions to execute tasks.
4. Shared Accounts: Enables cross-account access using IAM roles.
5. EC2/S3 Access: Policies for granting EC2 instances and users access to EC2 instances or S3 buckets.

AWS DynamoDB

1. DynamoDB Streams: Captures changes to DynamoDB tables for use in real-time applications.
2. Transact Operations*: Enables atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID) transactions on DynamoDB.
3. DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator): A fully managed, in-memory cache that accelerates DynamoDB read performance.
4. Strong Consistent Reads: Ensures the most up-to-date data is returned in read operations.
5. Write Through Strategy in RDS: Writing directly to a cache and the database to ensure data consistency.
6. ScanIndex Forward: Optimizes query performance when scanning DynamoDB indexes.

AWS X-Ray

1. X-Ray Daemon: Collects and uploads trace data to AWS X-Ray for monitoring and troubleshooting applications.
2. Side Container: Deploys the X-Ray Daemon alongside applications using containers for trace collection.
3. Annotations: Adds custom metadata to traces for better context during debugging.

AWS Secrets Manager & Parameter Store

1. Secrets Manager: Manages and securely stores sensitive information like API keys and database credentials.
2. Parameter Store: Part of AWS Systems Manager to store configuration data and secrets.

AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service) & Fargate

1. ECS: Manages containerized applications on EC2 instances or Fargate.
2. Fargate: Serverless compute engine for ECS, eliminating the need to manage EC2 instances.

AWS S3

1. SSE-S3 (Server-Side Encryption): Automatically encrypts S3 objects at rest using S3-managed keys.
2. Secure Transport Condition: Enforces HTTPS connections to S3.
3. Multi-Prefixed Objects: Allows organizing S3 objects using multiple prefixes for easier management.

AWS Cognito

1. Cognito Identity Pool: Provides AWS credentials to authenticate users and access AWS resources.
2. Authenticate Cognito: Manages user authentication and authorization for applications.

AWS CloudWatch

1. Evidently: A feature for A/B testing and feature flagging within CloudWatch for controlled rollouts.
2. Open Source Library: Provides integration with open-source monitoring and observability tools.

AWS API Gateway

1. Post Cache, Stage Variables: Manages API Gateway stages and caching to optimize API performance.

AWS Kinesis

1. Kinesis Data Streams: Real-time data streaming service for building real-time applications.
2. Kinesis Data Firehose: Fully managed service to load streaming data into AWS data stores like S3, Redshift, etc.
3. Kinesis Shard: A unit of capacity in a stream for reading and writing data.

AWS RDS

1. RDS Proxy: Improves database scalability and application performance by pooling database connections.
2. Write-Through Strategy: Writing directly to a cache and the database to ensure consistency.

AWS Application Load Balancer

1. ALB: Distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, ensuring high availability.

AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit)

1. Synth, Bootstrap: Generates CloudFormation templates from CDK code and prepares environments for deploying stacks.
2. Aspect Class: A way to apply common behaviors to AWS CDK resources.

AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model)

1. Local Invoke Command: Allows testing Lambda functions locally before deployment.
2. Sync Model, sam sync --watch: Syncs local resources with AWS in real-time for rapid iteration.

Additional Topics

1. Canary Release: Gradual rollout of new features to a small set of users to test before full deployment.
2. VPC Flow Logs: Captures network traffic flow within a VPC for monitoring and troubleshooting.
3. Elastic File System (EFS): Provides scalable file storage for use with EC2, Lambda, and other services.
4. Security Token Service (STS): Provides temporary security credentials for AWS resources.
5. Macie: A security service for discovering and protecting sensitive data in AWS.

Miscellaneous Topics Learned During Preparation

1. NAT Gateway: Allows instances in a private subnet to access the internet securely.
2. Docker Image Tag: Tags Docker images to manage different versions of application containers.
3. SQS FIFO Visibility Timeout: Ensures that messages are not processed multiple times in FIFO queues.

This list covers most of the concepts and services we should be familiar with when preparing for the AWS DVA-C02 exam.

Useful Keywords

Even though we tend to prepare from multiple videos, books, materials, question samples and use cases, remembering last minute points helpful in going through 140 minutes of exam since focus and dedication are rare commodity to sit for these exams. Some keywords straight to navigate in searching for key 'words' within options given such as,

'Trace' & 'Performance' means: Xray

'Secret' means: Secrets Manager

'PII' means: Macie

Newsletters

Learning is first step but sharing those learning are critical to get it benefited to rest of the world. Writing down key takeaways are of useful attempt to share the knowledge to wider engineering community. My newsletter on Engineering Leadership now reached to 21,419 views in the last one year!

👉Please feel free to share your exam experiences in the commends below.

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