AssociateAWS

AWS Certified Developer – Associate — Study Guide & Exam Overview

The AWS Developer Associate proves you can build, deploy, and debug cloud-native applications confidently. It is the natural next step for software engineers who have basic AWS exposure and want to demonstrate production-level skills in serverless, CI/CD, and secure application development.

Duration

130 min

Passing Score

720 / 1000 points

Level

Associate

Provider

AWS

What This Certification Covers

  • Building serverless applications with Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB
  • AWS developer tools: CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline (CI/CD)
  • IAM best practices: roles, policies, and least-privilege access for applications
  • Infrastructure-as-code with CloudFormation and the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM)
  • Debugging and observability with X-Ray, CloudWatch Logs Insights, and EventBridge

Exam Domain Breakdown

  • Development with AWS (32%)
  • Security (26%)
  • Deployment (24%)
  • Troubleshooting & Optimization (18%)

Exam Format

65 multiple-choice and multiple-response questions, 130 minutes, scored 100–1000 with passing score of 720

Study Tips to Pass Developer Associate

  1. 1Get hands-on with Lambda, SQS, SNS, and DynamoDB — these services dominate the exam
  2. 2Understand DynamoDB deeply: partition keys, sort keys, GSIs, LSIs, and capacity modes
  3. 3Master the full CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodeStar and the four Code* services
  4. 4Study authentication patterns: Cognito user pools, identity pools, and JWT token flows
  5. 5Practice with the AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) as an alternative to raw CloudFormation

Ready to test your knowledge? Take a free timed mock exam below.

Official Developer Associate exam page