Got my 2nd AWS certification on Saturday - AWS Developer Associate, thank God.
I passed the certification exam with a mark of 90% - which I was quite happy with.
However, I was not totally happy with my decision to take the exam. The exam was considerably easier than the Solution Architect (SA) one, it has almost no scenarios based questions - which I enjoy doing.
It also has a lot of overlap with the SA material with the added focus on DynamoDB. Honestly, I didn’t feel it is worth my AUD 220 exam fee. I did it because I want to get all three associate certs - but I started to question myself why, I certainly wouldn’t regard someone who has SA + Dev certificate more than someone who has just SA cert.
It is a good thing that AWS is going to have the content of this exam changed. The beta version of Developer certification was on for about a month I think, apparently it has a lot more of dev focused material such as CodeStar and CodePipeline (and thus less overlap with SA). Unfortunately I already booked myself on the normal exam before the beta was announced.
Study material
- A Cloud Guru
- Whizlabs
- My awesome AWS questions of the day
- Read few FAQs + cheatsheets of the net
Conclusion
If you have to pay for the certification yourselves and you already got Solution Architect, I suggest save your hard earned cash, skip this cert and do the SysOps instead.