Amazon Web Services · DVA-C02

DVA-C02 Exam: Complete AWS Developer Guide

Current DVA-C02 exam guide covering the $150 USD fee, 130-minute format, four domains, 720 passing score, preparation, and November 2026 retirement.

Last verified September 6, 2026

DVA-C02 exam at a glance

Facts last verified September 6, 2026

This exam retires on November 30, 2026. Check the vendor page before booking.

Domain breakdown

Who should take the DVA-C02 exam?

DVA-C02 targets developers who build, test, deploy, and debug cloud applications on AWS. AWS recommends at least one year of hands-on experience developing and maintaining applications with AWS services, plus proficiency in a high-level programming language and lifecycle fundamentals.

The exam is about application behavior, not broad infrastructure architecture. You should be able to use SDKs and APIs, build Lambda functions, integrate managed data and messaging services, protect credentials and data, automate delivery, and diagnose failures from logs and metrics.

There is no prerequisite certification. Cloud Practitioner can help with terminology, and Solutions Architect – Associate can help with service tradeoffs, but neither replaces developer practice.

Important: DVA-C02 retirement and DVA-C03

AWS has announced that November 30, 2026 is the last day to take DVA-C02. DVA-C03 becomes generally available December 1, 2026, with registration opening October 27. A certification earned through DVA-C02 remains active for its normal three-year period.

If you are prepared for C02, taking it before the deadline can be reasonable. If you are beginning from scratch, compare the new blueprint before committing: C03 keeps four domains but updates developer skills for current tooling and AI-assisted workflows. Allow time for a retake before the C02 cutoff.

Skills measured on DVA-C02

The official DVA-C02 exam guide defines four domains. Development and security account for 58% of scored content. Deployment and troubleshooting ensure the application can reach and survive production.

Development with AWS Services (32%)

Build applications using resilient patterns: loose coupling, event-driven communication, idempotency, retries with exponential backoff and jitter, pagination, caching, concurrency control, and graceful error handling. Understand synchronous versus asynchronous calls and stateful versus stateless components.

Lambda coverage includes handlers, runtimes, environment variables, layers, versions, aliases, event sources, execution roles, resource policies, concurrency, destinations, dead-letter handling, timeouts, memory, networking, and packaging. Know how configuration affects cold starts, scaling, permissions, and access to private resources.

API and integration services include API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, Step Functions, and Kinesis. Learn delivery semantics, filtering, ordering, fanout, failure handling, and how consumers avoid duplicate effects. Choose orchestration when a central workflow must track state and choreography when events can coordinate decoupled services.

Data access may use DynamoDB, S3, RDS, Aurora, ElastiCache, or other in-scope stores. Understand keys, indexes, consistency, conditional writes, transactions, TTL, streams, presigned URLs, multipart upload, and database connection management according to the service.

Security (26%)

Use IAM roles and temporary credentials for applications. Understand identity and resource policies, permissions boundaries, session policies, role assumption, and cross-account access. For end users, know the purpose of Amazon Cognito user pools and identity pools and common authentication or authorization flows.

Protect data with TLS and KMS-backed encryption. Know the relationship among encrypted resources, keys, policies, grants, encryption context, and envelope encryption. Services may manage encryption for you, but callers still need the correct permission and network path.

Keep secrets out of code, packages, environment logs, and repositories. Compare Secrets Manager with Systems Manager Parameter Store and use rotation when required. Validate input and minimize permissions even when a service endpoint is private.

Deployment (24%)

Package and deploy applications through repeatable pipelines. Understand CodeCommit or external source repositories, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, ECR, CloudFormation, the AWS Serverless Application Model, and common third-party integrations. Know what each stage produces and how artifacts move securely.

Deployment strategies include all-at-once, rolling, immutable, blue/green, canary, and linear traffic shifting. Choose based on downtime tolerance, rollback speed, capacity, cost, and risk. Lambda aliases and CodeDeploy can shift traffic while alarms trigger rollback.

Infrastructure as code makes environments reproducible. Practice parameters, outputs, mappings, conditions, change sets, stack policies, drift, nested stacks, and SAM templates. Test application and infrastructure changes before production and keep secrets out of templates.

Troubleshooting and Optimization (18%)

Instrument code with structured logs, metrics, traces, and correlation identifiers. CloudWatch provides logs, metrics, alarms, and dashboards; X-Ray traces distributed requests; CloudTrail records API activity. Know which evidence answers a question before changing production settings.

Troubleshoot permissions, throttling, retries, timeouts, concurrency, memory, network paths, service quotas, malformed events, and data-store hot spots. Read SDK error types and HTTP status codes. Optimization may involve caching, batching, compression, connection reuse, efficient keys, provisioned or on-demand capacity, and Lambda power tuning.

How to prepare for DVA-C02

Build a small serverless application: API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, and EventBridge, deployed with SAM or CloudFormation. Use a Cognito or IAM-based access path, store a secret correctly, add logs and traces, and deploy through a pipeline with a safe traffic-shift strategy.

Break it deliberately. Remove a permission, exceed a timeout, deliver a duplicate event, create a poison message, throttle a data store, and fail a deployment alarm. Diagnose each issue from the correct telemetry and restore service without losing or duplicating work.

Map the exercises to the official objectives, then take AWS's practice question set. Track misses by decision type—service, permission, deployment, or troubleshooting—and close gaps before booking.

DVA-C02 practice questions

Practice with code-adjacent scenarios and configuration fragments, but do not memorize syntax in isolation. Identify the event source, caller identity, resource policy, failure path, and operational constraint. The best answer is often the native feature with the least custom code.

Avoid dumps and claims of live questions. They breach AWS exam rules and are poor preparation for current, scenario-driven development decisions.

DVA-C02 compared with other AWS exams

Solutions Architect – Associate emphasizes workload design, while DVA-C02 emphasizes application implementation and delivery. DevOps Engineer – Professional goes deeper into multi-account automation, operations, resilience, and governance. Passing that Professional exam can recertify Developer – Associate under current AWS policy.

Career value of AWS Developer Associate

The certification supports cloud developer, backend developer, serverless developer, and platform- aware software engineer roles. Its strongest signal is the ability to use managed AWS services safely from code and ship changes through repeatable delivery systems.

Pair it with a public or explainable project showing tests, least-privilege policies, infrastructure as code, event failure handling, observability, and cost decisions. That evidence remains valuable even as the exam version changes.

Exam-day notes

• You have 130 minutes for 65 questions.
• Fifty are scored and 15 are unidentified unscored items.
• The US fee is $150 before tax and regional adjustments.
• The minimum scaled score is 720.
• Schedule early enough to retake before November 30, 2026 if necessary.

Prep resources

← More Amazon Web Services exams