DVA-C02 cheat sheet

Exam at a glance

Domain weightings

How much of the exam each domain covers. Spend your study time in proportion — the heavier the domain, the more questions you'll see.

Key terms

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers. You control memory, timeout, and concurrency, and Lambda scales automatically; it is central to the Development with AWS Services domain of DVA-C02.

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database offering single-digit-millisecond performance. Developers must understand partition and sort keys, secondary indexes, on-demand vs provisioned capacity, and DynamoDB Streams to build and optimize applications on it.

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway is a managed service for creating, publishing, and securing REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs. It handles request/response transformations, request validation, throttling, authorization, and stages, and commonly fronts Lambda functions in serverless applications.

Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito is an identity service that provides authentication and authorization for applications. User pools handle sign-up and sign-in and issue JSON Web Tokens, while identity pools grant temporary AWS credentials to access AWS services on a user's behalf.

AWS STS

AWS Security Token Service (STS) is a service that issues temporary, limited-privilege credentials, typically through the AssumeRole operation. Applications use STS to obtain short-lived credentials for cross-account access and role-based access rather than embedding long-lived keys.

AWS KMS

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that creates and controls the cryptographic keys used to encrypt data. Developers use KMS for encryption at rest across services like S3, DynamoDB, and Lambda environment variables, and for envelope encryption in application code.

AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that stores, retrieves, and automatically rotates secrets such as database credentials and API keys. It keeps sensitive values out of source code and, unlike Parameter Store, natively supports scheduled secret rotation.

Systems Manager Parameter Store

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store is a service for storing configuration data and secrets as parameters, including encrypted SecureString values backed by KMS. It is a low-cost way to manage application configuration and is frequently contrasted with Secrets Manager on the exam.

Amazon SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queue that decouples application components. Developers use standard and FIFO queues, visibility timeouts, and dead-letter queues to build resilient asynchronous and event-driven architectures.

AWS SAM

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) is an open-source framework and CLI for building serverless applications. It extends AWS CloudFormation with simplified syntax for functions, APIs, and event sources, and the SAM CLI builds, tests, and deploys applications locally and to AWS.

AWS CodeDeploy

AWS CodeDeploy is a deployment service that automates application releases to compute services such as Lambda, ECS, and EC2. It supports deployment strategies including in-place, blue/green, canary, and linear traffic shifting, which are core to the Deployment domain.

AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray is a distributed tracing service that helps developers analyze and debug applications. It records segments and subsegments as requests flow across services, producing a service map and traces used for root cause analysis and observability.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that collects logs, metrics, and alarms. Developers instrument code to emit structured logs and custom metrics, then use CloudWatch alarms and dashboards to detect and troubleshoot issues.