How to Ace the AWS-DVA: AWS Certified Developer Associate

Question 1 · Domain 1: Development with AWS Services

A startup wants to build a serverless API that captures user feedback with low latency and automatic scaling. Which combination of AWS services would best meet these requirements?

• API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB
• EC2, ELB, and RDS
• ECS, CloudFront, and Aurora
• Elastic Beanstalk, ElastiCache, and DocumentDB

Correct answer: API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB

API Gateway provides serverless API management, Lambda handles compute logic without server management, and DynamoDB offers low-latency, automatically scaling NoSQL database storage. This combination ensures scalability, performance, and minimal infrastructure overhead.

Question 2 · Domain 2: Security

A development team is building a microservices application and wants to ensure secure communication between services. They need to implement fine-grained access control and encryption. What is the MOST secure approach?

• Use IAM roles with VPC security groups and implement AWS PrivateLink for service communication
• Use public IP addresses and security group rules only
• Implement network ACLs without IAM roles
• Use shared security group across all services

Correct answer: Use IAM roles with VPC security groups and implement AWS PrivateLink for service communication

This approach provides multiple layers of security by using IAM roles for least privilege access, VPC security groups for network-level control, and PrivateLink for private, encrypted service communication without exposing services to the public internet.

Question 3 · Domain 3: Deployment

A startup is developing a microservices application and wants to implement a deployment strategy that minimizes downtime and allows gradual traffic shifting. Which AWS service and deployment approach would best meet these requirements?

• Use AWS CodeDeploy with a blue/green deployment strategy
• Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk with a rolling deployment
• Use AWS CloudFormation with in-place updates
• Use Amazon ECS with a standard rolling update

Correct answer: Use AWS CodeDeploy with a blue/green deployment strategy

Blue/green deployments with CodeDeploy allow zero-downtime deployments by creating a parallel environment and gradually shifting traffic. This approach provides a safe rollback mechanism and minimizes potential service interruptions during application updates.

Question 4 · Domain 4: Troubleshooting and Optimization

A microservices application is experiencing intermittent performance issues. Which AWS service would be most effective for tracing and identifying bottlenecks across distributed services?

• AWS X-Ray
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS CloudTrail
• AWS Config

Correct answer: AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray provides distributed tracing capabilities that help developers analyze and debug complex microservices architectures by tracking requests as they flow through different services and identifying performance bottlenecks and errors.

Question 5 · Unknown

You are developing a REST API using API Gateway that needs to log all requests and responses for debugging. Which approach provides the best integration with CloudWatch Logs?

• Enable CloudWatch Logs for API Gateway execution logs and data trace logs in the stage settings
• Use API Gateway request/response mapping templates to manually write to CloudWatch Logs
• Configure API Gateway to send metrics to CloudWatch Metrics only, as logs aren't supported
• Create a Lambda function to intercept all API calls and write logs to CloudWatch

Correct answer: Enable CloudWatch Logs for API Gateway execution logs and data trace logs in the stage settings

API Gateway has built-in CloudWatch Logs integration through stage settings, where you can enable both execution logs (method calls) and data trace logs (full request/response bodies). This is the native, most efficient approach without manual implementation.