I took the developer exam with worst possible preparation. I started preparing only a couple of days before the scheduled exam date and believe it or not, I read Dynamodb last night and FAQs few hours before the exam.
But one thing which really helped me is the knowledge I gained on S3, EC2, VPC, Route 53 during my preparation for Solutions Architect Associate exam. Those are the very important exam topics, along with Dynamodb. Rest of the topics are like 1 mark questions, for example ‘What is Cloudformation’, etc.,
Here are some of the exam tips.
- Region for AWS Java SDK.
- Languages supported by Elastic Beanstalk, Cloudformation
- Failure scenarios of CF and steps involved (Creating stack in progress, Created, Rollback in progress)
- If there’s an given issue with a resource, what will happen to Cloudformation
- Which services are free to use, but charged for the resources(E Beanstalk, CF)
- Error codes for S3, Ec2 and S3 Api Calls (Very important)
- SQS visibility timeouts, what will happen if timeout is 0 and what to do to reduce CPU burning cycles(Long timeout), etc.,
- One tricky question about SQS standard Queue and FIFO
- SQS/SWF job duration.
- Use case of Classic/Application load balancer
- Questions regarding copying/sharing Volumes, Snapshots, AMI.
- S3 – Storage Classes metrics, Lifecycle policies, Versioning, Multipart uploads, Transfer acceleration.
- S3- When to use which storage class, security for buckets(ACLs, Bucket policies)
- Naming convention:
- Bucket – http://bucketname.s3-aws-region.aws.com
- One definite question about CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing).
- Understand how STS, authentication works (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-identity-and-access-management-now-with-identity-federation/)
- VPC – Source/Destination check disabled, Bastion hosts
- why one instance unable to connect even though it’s in public subnet.
- VPC peering, Direct connect
- EBS vs Instance stores
- Last but the most important
- DYNAMO DB – READ, WRITE CAPACITY UNITS
- Understand about Global secondary index, Local secondary index, partition key, sort key
-
DYNAMODB FAQS
-
DONT TAKE THE EXAM IF YOU ARE NOT CONFIDENT IN DYNAMODB
If you are aware about the points, then Dev exam will be a walk in the park for you.
Wish you good luck. Please share your thoughts and comments on this if you have any.