aws-certified-developer-exam-tips

A list of knowledge areas per AWS service that should be remembered for the AWS Certified Developer - Associate exam

IAM

• Never use the IAM root account for day-to-day activities
• Always setup MFA on the IAM root account
• Use IAM Policy Simulator to test out permission levels
• Know the usage scope of IAM Managed Policies, Customer Managed Policies and Inline Policies

EC2

• Have an understanding of which EC2 pricing options to use and when
• Have an understanding of the different EBS volume types and when to use cases
• Know the differences between the ELB types
• Know that you need x-forwarded-for for IP tracking and Sticky Sessions for session management
• Never store IAM programmatic keys on an EC2 instances or within code

RDS

• Understand the difference between read-replicas and multi-AZ for RDS
• Know the difference between Automated Backups and Snapshots in RDS

ElasticCache

• Know the 2 types of ElastiCache offerings and when to use ElastiCache

Secrets

• Know the difference between Secrets Manager Parameter Store and Secrets Manager

S3

• Understand the S3 storage classes and tradeoffs
• Understand S3 encryption options and how these are implemented
• Be confident about how to use the x-amz-server-side-encryption parameter with bucket policies and request headers
• Understand why CORS is important in S3

CloudFront

• Be familiar with CloudFront Origin, Distribution, Edge Location, and TTL

Lambda

• Understand Lambda versioning, using Lambda in a VPC, and concurrent execution limits
• Know the errors returned when Lambda concurrency executions are exhausted

API Gateway

• Be knowledgeable about API Gateway and the API Types it supports, Caching, and Throttling
• Know the errors returned when API Gateway is thorttled

X-Ray

• Be familiar with X-Ray and how it is configured for Lambda, EC2 and Containers (and where)

DynamoDB

• Know your DynamoDB calculations for RCU and WCU well - practice this repeatedly, it will come up on the exam
• Know that Eventually Consistent reads are better for read performance and Strongly Consistent reads are better for read consistency
• Be comfortable choosing a partition key
• Be comfortable choosing a composite key
• Know when to use Scan vs Query
• Know difference between Local Secondary Index and Global Secondary Index
• Know when to use DynamoDB Accelerator and where to place this in an architecture
• Know about DynamoDB streams and its use case
• Be familar with the errors returned when provisioned throughput has exceeded

KMS

• Understand envelope encryption with KMS
• Understand CMK usage patterns with KMS

SQS / SNS / SQS

• Know the difference between long polling and short polling with SQS
• Know that SQS is pull based and SNS is push based
• Know the message size limits, maximum days of retention and default days of retention in SQS
• Know the difference queue types in SQS and what makes them different
• Understand visibility timeout, the default value, the maxmium value and how it is used in a scenario
• Understand SQS delay queues
• Know that SES is a service and when it can be used

Kinesis

• Know the difference between Kinesis Data Streams, Data Analytics and Data Streams
• Understand how Shards and Consumers are configured, particularly about the number of record processors

Elastic Beanstalk

• Understand Elastic Beanstalk and its use case
• Understand the Elastic Beanstalk deployment options well, along with selecting the best option for a given scenario
• Know that you can have RDS inside or outside of an Elastic Beanstalk and its tradeoffs

CI/CD

• Understand when to use CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy and CodePipeline
• Know the deployment options of CodePipeline
• Understand the CodeDeploy Lifecycle Event Hooks well

ECS / ECR

• Understand ECS and its advantages offered
• Know the basics of ECR and how to build, tag and push docker images to ECR
• Know how to deploy Docker using Elastic Beanstalk

CloudFormation

• Be comfortable with CloudFormation, the template structure and Nested Stacks
• Understand how CloudFormation and SAM work together

Cognito

• Understand how to apply User Pools and Identity Pools to scenarios using Cognito

CloudWatch

• Understand the basics of CloudWatch, the default metrics and intervals, Custom Metrics and options available
• Know the difference between CloudWatch and CloudTrail