In June 2020, I passed the AWS Certified Solution Architect Exam after almost preparing for 5 months ( an hour or so everyday) and I was so pumped that I decided to take another AWS exam. I started preparing for the Developer Associate exam at the end of June and cleared by July end.

Here is my badage: AWS Badge

Developer associate is Developer focused and its bit different than the solution architect exam. I found Developer associate exam harder than the Solution Architect, but YMMV.

So here are my tips and preparation topics:

• You success in exam depends upon recognizing keywords in the questions. All answers may look similar but keywords will lead to right answer. Pay attention to words. For example: 'low cost', 'encryption at rest vs encryption in transit'.

• Know how to do Read Capacity Units (RCU) and Write Capacity Units (WCU) calculations. You might get one or two questions on determining RCU/WCU. Don't forget to pay attention to strongly consistent/ Eventual consistent keyword in question.

• Sometimes you may find answer to questions in other questions. While reviewing see if any other question has answer to it.

• Use all the time available for the exam. If finished early, spend time in reviewing all questions.

• Attempt as many mock exams you can. This will prepare you on time management and questions patterns. Questions will be verbose in real exam.

• There could be command level questions like what this command do, when to use etc.

• You need to understand the concepts very well and should have some hands on. It is easy to eliminate two answers.

• Know CI/CD services like CodeDeploy, CodeBuild, CodeCommit. Understand BuildSpec and AppSpec difference. Code Deploy lifecycle hooks. CodeDeploy Deployment Types for Lambda, ECS and EC2.

• Cloudformation, KMS, SQS, SNS, ECS, API gateway, IAM (Inline policies/ Managed Policies) and Lambda (Concurrent execution Limit,

• DynamoDB. Local Secondary Index vs Global. DynamoDB Accelerator. DynamoDB Streams. SCAN vs Query.

• Amazon S3, EC2, Elastic Beanstalk and its deployment types. Knows CORS.

• CloudWatch, CloudTrail, App X-Ray

• You might also get architecture level questions but not much.

Good Luck!