AWS DVA-C03: AWS Certified Developer - Associate (updated)

Last checked October 22, 2026 against the official AWS exam page.

1. Question 1Development with AWS Services

   A Lambda function consumes messages from an Amazon SQS queue, and some messages fail repeatedly. The team wants the failed messages set aside for inspection without blocking the main queue. What should it configure?

   1. AUse SNS fan-out so the queue receives copies of published messages
   2. BEnable provisioned concurrency on the function alias for warm starts
   3. CA dead-letter queue (redrive policy) on the source queue
   4. DIncrease the function timeout to 900 seconds for longer batch runs
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   Correct answer: C

   A dead-letter queue receives messages that exceed the configured receive count, so the main queue keeps flowing and the failures can be examined later. Timeouts and concurrency do not isolate failing messages, and SNS fan-out is a publishing pattern.

2. Question 2Deployment

   A team wants to run containers without managing servers or cluster hosts. Which service fits best?

   1. AAmazon ECS on AWS Fargate
   2. BAmazon Athena serverless SQL
   3. CAmazon RDS for MySQL
   4. DAWS Snow Family Snowball
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   Correct answer: A

   Fargate runs container tasks without the team managing EC2 instances, while ECS handles scheduling. Athena, RDS, and Snowball do not run application containers.

3. Question 3Troubleshooting and Optimization

   A developer needs to trace one request across API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB to find the slowest segment. Which service provides this?

   1. AAWS Config
   2. BAWS Budgets
   3. CAWS X-Ray
   4. DAmazon Macie
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   Correct answer: C

   AWS X-Ray collects traces and service maps so the latency of each segment can be seen. Config, Budgets, and Macie address configuration, cost, and data discovery respectively.

4. Question 4Security

   Mobile users sign in with a social identity and must receive temporary AWS credentials to access an S3 prefix. Which service should be used?

   1. AA shared IAM user for every app user with long-lived access keys stored in the app bundle
   2. BRoot account keys in the app, used to sign S3 requests for each user session at runtime
   3. CHard-coded access keys committed in the source code and rotated manually each year by the team
   4. DAn Amazon Cognito identity pool that exchanges tokens for temporary credentials
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   Correct answer: D

   A Cognito identity pool exchanges identity-provider tokens for scoped, temporary AWS credentials. Shared users, root keys, and hard-coded keys are long-lived and unsafe.

5. Question 5Development with AWS Services

   Which operation most efficiently returns all orders for one customer sorted by order date, when the table's partition key is customerId and its sort key is orderDate?

   1. AQuery using customerId as the partition key, which returns items in sort-key order
   2. BScan the whole table with a filter expression on customerId and sort the matches by orderDate
   3. CBatchGetItem with a key list of every order ID, fetched in parallel
   4. DCreate a global secondary index on the status attribute for order lookups
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   Correct answer: A

   A Query on the partition key reads only that customer's items, and results come back in sort-key order. A Scan reads the whole table, BatchGetItem needs every key in advance, and a status index does not match the access pattern.