My Background

First a bit about me and my background. I currently work full-time as a Fabrication Engineer. I have a degree in Computer Info. Systems and have some programming experience, dont worry the Dev Associate exam does not expect you to write any code. I do also currently have an AWS Solutions Architect Associate cert. You can visit My resume site if you would like to know more about me and view projects.

EXAM
First if this is your first AWS cert I would recommend getting the AWS-SAA or the Cloud Practitioner certification, they lay a strong foundation for AWS.
Anyways on to the exam this past Friday night, (who takes a test on a Friday night?! 🤓) I work full-time and the proctor administering the test was scheduled to undergo server maintenance this weekend. Anyways got my score report this morning and scored an 862/1000.
I felt confident going in but there was still some questions that tripped me up or I was just simply way overthinking them. Some questions just seemed vague, but I had to slow down and eliminate some of the options. I finished the exam with about an hour to spare so went back through some of the questions that I had flagged which were about 15 or so just to take my time on them.

Things You Must Know

• DynamobDB
  • Know about DAX, GSI/LSI, WCU/RCU's, and Streams
  • Got many questions on the exam regarding these
• API Gateway
  • Know about Authorizers, Integration Types, Caching, Usage plans, throttling, and CORS
  • Not surprising API Gateway came up quite a bit.
• Lambda
  • Know this inside and out. Know how it gets invoked, event source mappings, Sync/Async, Lambda@Edge, How to use w/ VPC, performance and security, environment variables, and know concurrency limits.
  • Lots of questions on Lambda, not just about Lambda but many of the other services that it interacts with.
• Elastic Beanstalk
  • Know your deployment options for updates and the best use case for them given a scenario.
  • Migration step to decouple RDS
• Codebuild/CodeCommit/CodePipeLine/CodeStar
  • Got some questions on CodeCommit, couple on CodePipeline, couple on Codebuild, and one on CodeStar.
• Docker/ECS/ECR
  • Know how containers work, Dockerfiles, How to push/pull from ECR or Docker Hub
  • Know Task Definitions, Placement strategies, ECS w/ Load Balancing
  • Know the CLI commands for V1 and V2 to authenticate into ECR and the push/pull commands
• Cognito
  • Know User Pools and Identity pools and when to use which.
  • Its use w/ API Gateway
• Elasticache
  • Know the caching strategies write-through, lazy-loading, and when to use which
  • Know differences between Redis and Memcached.
• Encryption / Decryption
  • Know all the S3 types of encryption
  • KMS, CMK's, and envelope encryption
  • Also know about the encryption headers
• SQS/SNS/SWF/Step functions
  • Know when to use which, know the differences between them.
  • Know how they work with Lambda.
• SSM Parameter Store/Secrets Manager
  • Know the differences and when to use given a scenario
• CloudWatch/CloudTrail
  • Know what these do and their limitations
  • Know which one to use given a scenario
  • Alarms and Events
• Random Services that I got one or two questions on but are generally good to know not only for the exam but in your AWS career
  • X-Ray
  • S3
  • Kinesis and its different types
  • AWS Certificate Manager
  • Cloudfront
  • Cloudformation
  • SAM
  • STS
  • Git, Github, Gitlab etc etc
  • Thats all I can think of for now. Hope this helps someone!

Exam Prep
To prep for the exam, I used @Stephane Maarek's and @Neal Davis' udemy courses also did Jon Bonso's practice exams, to make sure I was ready. With these resources you'll have plenty of material to learn and pass the exam.

Follow Me
If you want to follow me on my cloud journey or have any questions Im always glad to help. You can follow me on
ORDEProject.com
LinkedIn
Twitter