AWS
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #15 Full-Scale Multiple-Choice Mock Exam — 50 Questions + Explanations
The final post of the DVA-C02 series. Matched to the real exam's domain weights (development 32% , security 26% , deployment 24% , troubleshooting and optimization 18%), you solve 50 questions and find your weak domains through each question's answer and explanation. Solve them on the clock, then go back to the relevant domain post to shore up any gaps.
AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) #8 Domain 3-2 Deployment: Systems Manager Operations Automation
The eighth post of the SOA-C03 series covers Systems Manager, the core tool of the deployment and automation domain. It covers how to manage config and secrets with Parameter Store, apply patches in bulk with Patch Manager, maintain a desired state with State Manager, connect securely without keys via Session Manager, and also covers Run Command and Automation.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #14 Exam Tips and Frequently Missed Patterns
The post right before the wrap-up of the DVA-C02 series. It lays out time management for 65 questions in 130 minutes, how to filter answer choices with constraint keywords, handling multiple-response and BEST/MOST questions, the most frequently confused concept pairs in DVA (SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge, User Pool vs Identity Pool, Secrets Manager vs Parameter Store, etc.), a per-domain keyword→service quick mapping, and a just-before-the-exam checklist.
AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) #7 Domain 3-1 Deployment — CloudFormation in Depth and IaC
The seventh post of the SOA-C03 series covers CloudFormation, the first topic of the deployment and automation domain (22%). It covers the structure of stacks and templates, change sets and drift detection, stack policies and deletion protection, StackSets for deploying across multiple accounts and regions, and the relationship with other IaC tools such as CDK and Terraform.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #13 Domain 4-2 Troubleshooting and Optimization — Optimization and Problem Solving
The second post of the DVA-C02 troubleshooting domain. It covers choosing caching layers (CloudFront,ElastiCache,DAX,API Gateway), Lambda performance tuning (the relationship between memory and CPU,cold starts,concurrency), handling DynamoDB throttling, and the error codes that frequently appear on the exam (429,502,504,ProvisionedThroughputExceededException, etc.) and how to read them. This is the final step of looking at metrics, narrowing down the cause, and fixing it.
AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) #6 Domain 2-2 Reliability — Backup, Restore, and Disaster Recovery (DR)
The sixth post of the SOA-C03 series covers data protection, the second axis of the reliability domain. It covers EBS snapshots and AMIs, RDS automated backups and snapshots, how to centrally manage backup policies with AWS Backup, the meaning of RPO and RTO, and the DR strategies that progress from backup to pilot light to warm standby to multi-site.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #12 Domain 4-1 Troubleshooting and Optimization — Observability
The first post of the DVA-C02 troubleshooting domain. It covers, at the exam level, CloudWatch Logs (log groups,streams,Logs Insights) and Metrics (standard,custom,high-resolution), Alarms, X-Ray distributed tracing (segments,subsegments,service map,sampling), and how to extract metrics from logs with EMF (Embedded Metric Format). The key is the tools that trace failures and narrow down the cause.
AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) #5 Domain 2-1 Reliability: Multi-AZ, Auto Scaling, and ELB Health Checks
The fifth post of the SOA-C03 series covers availability operations, the first topic of the Reliability domain (22%). It covers redundancy across Availability Zones, Auto Scaling group capacity, policies, and lifecycle hooks, health checks and connection draining per ELB type, and Route 53 health-check-based failover.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #11 Domain 3-3 Deployment — Deployment Strategies
The third post of the DVA-C02 deployment domain. It covers, at the exam level, the difference between in-place and blue/green deployment, traffic-shifting methods like canary,linear,all-at-once, weighted routing using Lambda aliases and versions, gradual deployment through API Gateway stages, and automatic rollback tied to CloudWatch alarms. The key is how to update safely with zero downtime.
AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) #4 Domain 1-3 Monitoring — Automated Recovery and Performance Optimization
The fourth post of the SOA-C03 series covers automated responses after detection. It covers how EventBridge reacts to events, how to automate recovery with Systems Manager Automation runbooks, EC2 automated recovery and Auto Scaling self-healing, and the flow of diagnosing performance bottlenecks with Compute Optimizer and CloudWatch while optimizing cost along the way.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #10 Domain 3-2 Deployment — IaC and Serverless Deployment
The second post of the DVA-C02 deployment domain. It covers, at the exam level, CloudFormation's template structure (Resources,Parameters,Mappings,Outputs), stacks,change sets,drift, nested stacks, SAM's template and sam deploy,sam local that simplify serverless deployment, and Elastic Beanstalk's deployment policies (All at once,Rolling,Immutable) along with .ebextensions.
AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) #3 Domain 1-2 Monitoring — CloudWatch Logs, Logs Insights, Agent
The third post in the SOA-C03 series covers the log side of CloudWatch. It covers the structure of log groups and log streams, retention periods and cost, how to collect logs and OS metrics with the CloudWatch Agent, metric filters that extract metrics from logs, Logs Insights queries, and subscription filters that deliver logs in real time.