How to get AWS Developer Associate certified in just 5 weeks 😎

6 min readJul 2, 2020

As a Software Engineer by profession, I use cloud services in my everyday job. Though I had my feet dipped into the waters of cloud technology already, I wanted to up my ante. Since Amazon is one of the major leaders in the cloud business, I decided to pursue a certification in AWS Cloud. What’s better than a pandemic lockdown to learn new technologies and get certified in them? Haha.

I took 5 weeks to prepare for the AWS Cloud Developer Associate Exam (typically, the recommended prep time is 12–15 weeks) by studying for 3–4 hours every day as I had a lot of time on my hands (thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown) and I was able to score 894/1000 on the certification exam! So, here is a roadmap to getting “AWS Developer Associate” certified in just 5 weeks, which worked for me and hope it helps you too.

Week 0: Deciding which certification is best for you

The official AWS Certification site classifies all AWS certifications into 4 main levels:

Foundational-level: Cloud Practitioner
Associate-level: Solutions Architect Associate, Developer Associate, SysOps Administrator Associate
Professional-level: Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional
Specialty AWS Certifications: Machine Learning, Alexa Skill Builder, and a bunch others

AWS Certifications. Source: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/

Having no prior experience with AWS specifically, I decided to start with the Foundational-level AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.

A quick Google search for the best resources to prepare for AWS Certifications lead me to ACloudGuru. I recommend you sign up for ACloudGuru as it has self-paced courses with structured content, hands-on lab exercises, quizzes after each chapter, AWS Sandbox environments to play around with AWS services, and an exam simulator — basically, it’s a complete package to prepare for your certification. I signed up for the ACloudGuru’s Cloud Practitioner Course which has around 10 hours’ worth of content and spent the entire Week 0 in finishing this course.

I found this course to be very basic as it is intended for absolute beginners in cloud technologies. If you have never used or worked with a cloud service before, I absolutely recommend you to start with this. But if you do have some knowledge about cloud technologies or have some prior experience with AWS, I would suggest you to directly start with any Associate-level certifications.

It is not mandatory for you to finish the Cloud Practitioner certification exam before you take any of the Associate-level certification exams, but it is mandatory to take an Associate-level exam before you proceed to a Professional-level exam.

Week 1: ACloudGuru — Necessary but not sufficient

The next level is the Developer Associate certification. I started with ACloudGuru’s “AWS Certified Developer Associate 2020” course to strengthen my basic foundation of all AWS services. Although this course has just 21 hours worth of content, it took me 3x more time to absorb everything in-depth and could only complete 80% of this course in Week 1. Be prepared to get your hands dirty with the lab exercises, and make some notes and flashcards as you go through each chapter.

I found the speed of the videos in ACloudGuru to be a bit slow in 1x mode(I watched all them in 1.75x to 2x). This helps you to quickly absorb the theory behind each service and spend more time on the labs instead. The labs can be practiced on either a personal AWS account or on the sandbox environments ACloudGuru provides — which I found to be very easy to use. Also, I found the discussion forum to be quite active and a good way to ask questions in case you get stuck with something.

The most important thing to note here is to play around with the services and become familiarised with them as much as possible as it gets very confusing later on to remember all these services if you decide just to read the content.

Week 2: Whitepapers

Spent Week 2 in finishing up the remainder of the course and reading up on all the whitepapers recommended by the official AWS Certification site.

Reading lengthy papers is boring and it’s hard to remember everything you read, so make necessary notes.

It’ll come handy during your revision and will help you finish all the whitepapers (9–10 whitepapers) quickly without missing out on the topics you don’t already know.

Week 3: Take Jon Bonso’s practice exams

With 3 weeks of learning about all the AWS services, it was time to evaluate my exam readiness. I started by taking the free mock exam of ACloudGuru. This mock exam’s pattern mimics the final AWS Developer Associate exam with 65 multiple-choice questions, a 130-minute time limit, and a passing mark of 720 out of a score of 1000.

Disappointed with my level of preparedness and realizing the inadequacy of ACloudGuru’s content, I scavenged through the discussion forum of ACloudGuru to read the exam experiences of other students. That’s when I stumbled upon this amazing resource on Udemy -

Jon Bonso’s AWS Certified Developer Associate Practice Exams.

It consists of 4 practice exams with exclusive links to an excellent tutorial and multiple cheat-sheets on TutorialsDojo, and they reflect the difficulty level of the actual certification exam. I highly recommend you buy these exams since ACloudGuru’s content is not at all sufficient to pass the certification exam!

The most important thing to remember in this week is to take Jon Bonso’s practice exams and to review your performance carefully and fill your knowledge gap by reading through all the cheat-sheets on TutorialsDojo.

Week 4: FAQs, additional resources, revision

Dedicate this entire week to revision. If you have more time left, here are some resources the official AWS Certification site recommends —

The Official study guide for AWS Developer Associate Certification exam
A few important FAQ pages:

3. Exam Guide:

4. Sample Questions:

Although I did not read the entire official study guide, I did take the sample tests from that book and that seemed to suffice. I did not find them as good as Jon Bonso’s practice exam questions, but this book is an optional resource (if you already have this book with you) If you have read all the content on TutorialsDojo, then the above-mentioned FAQs are optional.

Remember to revise all your notes, flashcards, cheat-sheets, whitepapers, Jon Bonso’s practice exam questions, and ACloudGuru’s mock exam questions.

My exam experience

The AWS Certification exam can be taken either at a test center or by an online-proctored exam from the comforts of your home. Since I have never taken an online-proctored exam before and the prerequisites for it looked daunting, I decided to drive up to the test center with my mask and hand sanitizer!

I felt the exam to be quite harder than I expected and the questions were not at all straight-forward. The level of difficulty which I experienced was —

AWS Certified Cloud Developer Associate exam > Jon Bonso’s practice exams > ACloudGuru’s mock exam

Preparing for this exam is quite different from being an AWS Cloud Developer in real-life as the exam tests you on some unique and rare scenario-based questions. You might not have experienced all the exceptions and errors while using AWS services but the exam expects you to know them.

Real-life AWS experience is recommended but not required to take up this exam.

I finished all 65 questions in 120 minutes and used the last 10 minutes to review all of them quickly. I ended up scoring around 90% (894/1000) on the exam despite the difficulty level :D

Final thoughts

Don’t get intimidated if you find the exam prep to be intense. It is quite a lot of content but if you are determined to study all the topics mentioned above in-depth, success will be yours!

All the very best!