Course orientation: the exam, the change to DVA-C03 and how to study

The Developer – Associate exam does not ask you to recite service limits. It describes something a developer runs into, such as a function that times out under load, a deployment that has to roll back on its own, or a secret that ended up in a log, and asks which change fixes it. To answer quickly you need to have seen these things happen. This course gets you there by having you write the code, run it in your own AWS account and then clean it up.

This page explains how the course works, how the exam is built, which version of the exam to book, and how to study.

How the course works

There are eleven modules. Modules 2 to 10 each follow the same rhythm:

1. Lessons. One topic per page. Each opens with why it matters, includes a Try it block you can run with the AWS CLI or a short Python script, and ends with Exam tips.
2. A lab. Numbered steps with complete commands, a Check your work list and a Clean up section. Every lab says at the top what, if anything, it costs.
3. A checkpoint. New questions across the whole module, never repeats of the lesson questions, so they test whether the ideas transfer.

Module 1 (this page and the sandbox lab) gets your tools and your account ready. Module 11 closes the course with a capstone that ships a serverless API through a pipeline, an exam strategy lesson and a full-length practice exam of 65 questions weighted like the real one.

Unlocking pages and saving progress

• Module 1 is open to everyone. You can read it and answer its questions without an account.
• Sign in to keep your progress. Sign in with your email address: there is no password, just a link emailed to you. Your progress is then saved, so it follows you to any device.
• Each later page unlocks when you pass the one before it. Every page ends with its own questions. Get at least 7 out of 10 right and the next page opens.
• Answers appear after a pass or three tries. You can try as often as you like; once you pass, or after your third try, the correct answers and their explanations are shown.

Which exam to book: DVA-C02 or DVA-C03

What changed recently (September 2026): AWS announced that DVA-C03 replaces DVA-C02. Registration for DVA-C03 opens on 27 October 2026, delivery starts on 1 December 2026, and the last day to take DVA-C02 is 30 November 2026. AWS says the full DVA-C03 exam guide, with its detailed task statements, will be published when registration opens. Sources: AWS Training and Certification blog, exam page.

This course is written for DVA-C03, because almost everyone who starts it now will sit the exam after 30 November. What AWS has said about DVA-C03 so far comes from its announcement. The course’s DVA-C03 details will be checked against the exam guide AWS publishes on 27 October 2026; until then, the published DVA-C02 guide is the detailed reference, and most of its tasks carry over. Before you book, read the current guide linked from the course page.

How the exam is built

These facts come from AWS’s DVA-C02 exam guide, and AWS’s announcement says DVA-C03 keeps the same shape.

• 65 questions. 50 affect your score. The other 15 are unscored questions AWS is trying out, and they are not identified, so treat every question as if it counts.
• Two question types. Multiple choice has one correct answer and three wrong ones. Multiple response has two or more correct answers among five or more options; the question says how many to pick.
• No penalty for guessing. An unanswered question is scored as wrong. Never leave one blank.
• Scaled score. Results run from 100 to 1,000 and the minimum passing score is 720. Scaling evens out differences between exam forms, so 720 is not the same as 72% correct.
• Compensatory scoring. You pass on the overall score. You do not need a passing score in each domain, but a weak domain still costs marks.

The time allowed, the fee, the languages and how to book are on the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam page. You book and sit the exam yourself with AWS. Pontelon does not run exams or sell vouchers, and this course is independent of AWS.

The domains and their weights

What DVA-C03 adds, according to AWS’s announcement

• A new AI security task in the Security domain: access to AI services, data privacy, content filtering, and securing how AI agents use tools.
• AI-assisted development across all four domains: code generation and review, test automation, help with CI/CD, troubleshooting and performance.
• Container images built and managed with Amazon ECR, and deployed to Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS and AWS Fargate.
• Newly in scope: Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Q, Kiro, Amazon Data Firehose and AWS PrivateLink.
• Out of scope: prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) design, choosing AI models, Amazon SageMaker AI and designing AI governance frameworks.

The DVA-C02 guide already flags some of this as emerging topics that may appear as unscored questions: AI-assisted development tools, the security risks of building with AI services, and AWS AI tools for testing, CI/CD and error analysis. Modules 7 and 8 teach them.

What the exam does not expect you to do

The DVA-C02 guide lists jobs that are out of scope for the target candidate: designing architectures (distributed systems, microservices, database schemas), designing and creating CI/CD pipelines, administering IAM users and groups, administering servers and operating systems, and designing AWS network infrastructure. You will still use pipelines, IAM and VPCs from the developer’s side, which is how the questions frame them.

How the labs work

• A separate AWS account, never a work or production account. The next lab sets it up with a budget alert and multi-factor authentication (MFA): a second proof of identity on top of a password.
• No long-lived access keys. The CLI and your Python scripts sign in with short-lived credentials that expire on their own. Module 2 explains why.
• Cost stated at the top, clean-up at the end. Labs stay within the Free Tier where they can and say so when they cannot.
• Python 3.12 or newer with boto3, the AWS SDK for Python, plus the AWS CLI version 2 and the AWS SAM CLI. AWS CloudShell, a terminal in the browser, already has all three.

A study plan you can follow

The plan is a sequence, not a timetable. Go at the pace your week allows.

1. Do module 1 fully. Every later lab assumes the sandbox from the next lab exists.
2. For each module, read the lessons and run every Try it block, do the lab including its clean-up, then take the checkpoint without notes.
3. Log your misses. For each wrong answer, write one line: the detail you missed and why your answer lost. Patterns show up quickly.
4. Revisit before moving on. Later modules build on earlier ones; IAM gaps from module 2 come back in Lambda, APIs and security.
5. Build the capstone after module 10, then sit the practice exam in one go and map every miss back to a lesson.
6. Read the DVA-C03 exam guide once it is published, and check every service in its in-scope list against what you can explain.

aws --version
python3 --version
python3 -c "import boto3; print('boto3', boto3.__version__)"
sam --version