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- DEA
AWS certification
AWS Data Engineer – Associate
The DEA exam is a design exam. Most questions are a short scenario with four architectures that would all technically work, and the one that is right is the one that meets the constraint the scenario put in the second sentence. So knowing what a service does is where preparation starts, not where it finishes.
Below are the 10 AWS services in this library the exam asks about, ranked by how heavily it leans on each. These weights are this library’s own reading, not AWS’s — AWS’s published exam guide is still the document to plan around. What they are good for is order: revise down the list rather than through the alphabet.
Asked about constantly
Asked about regularly
- AWS DynamoDBA serverless key-value and document database with single-digit millisecond responses at any scale, and DAX, its in-memory cache, for microseconds.
- AWS RDS and AuroraManaged relational databases: six engines run for you, plus Aurora, AWS's own MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible engine, with standbys, replicas and backups built in.
- AWS IAMWho can do what to which AWS resource, and under what conditions. Every request to AWS is checked against it.
- AWS KMSCreates and guards the keys that encrypt your data, lets a policy decide every use of them, and hands out data keys for envelope encryption.
- AWS CloudWatchMetrics, logs, alarms and dashboards for your AWS resources and applications, with alarms that notify people or act on their own.
Comes up
- AWS EC2Virtual machines you choose, size and run yourself: the most flexible compute on AWS, and the most work.
- AWS LambdaRuns your code in response to events, with no servers to manage. You pay per request and by the millisecond, and a run lasts 15 minutes at most.
- AWS VPCYour own private network in AWS: its address range, a subnet in each Availability Zone, and the rules for what reaches what.
- AWS S3 GlacierThree S3 storage classes for archives: Instant Retrieval, read in milliseconds; Flexible Retrieval, restored in minutes to hours; and Deep Archive, the lowest cost, restored within 12 to 48 hours.
Then learn the shapes
Exam scenarios are not built service by service. They are built out of a small number of architectures with the names changed, and recognising which one a scenario is describing narrows four plausible answers down to one. There are 16 of them, each with the phrases in a brief that point at it.
AWS architecture patterns →Questions
- Which AWS services does the Data Engineer – Associate exam cover?
- More than any one page can list, but the weight is not spread evenly — a handful of services carry most of the questions. This page ranks the 10 services in the library that the DEA exam asks about, heaviest first, so revision can follow the weight rather than the alphabet.
- Is reading about services enough to pass DEA?
- On its own, no. The exam asks you to choose between services under constraints, not to recite what each one does — most questions are a short scenario with four designs that would all technically work. That is why the service pages end in traps and an exam-style question, and why the practice scenarios ask you to produce an architecture rather than pick one.
- How should I revise for DEA?
- Learn the service, learn what it is mistaken for, learn the shape it belongs to, then design against a brief and have the design marked. Knowing that SQS decouples is not the same as recognising "must never reject an order" in a paragraph of business requirements and knowing what to draw.
- Are these weights official?
- No, and nothing here should be read as AWS's own exam guide — that is published by AWS and is the document to plan around. These weights are this library's reading of how heavily each exam leans on each service, used to put revision in a sensible order. Every fact on the service pages themselves is checked against AWS's own documentation, and each page lists the pages it was checked against.
Other AWS certifications
Practise the part the exam actually tests
Read a scenario, build the architecture on a canvas, and have it scored against what the scenario requires — with the reason behind every requirement, which is the part that transfers to a question you have not seen.
Browse the scenarios