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AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C03)

Important Notice

DVA-C03 is the current exam version from December 1, 2026. AWS's exam guide states that registration for DVA-C03 opened October 27, 2026, that the last day to take DVA-C02 is November 30, 2026, and that DVA-C03 "is in use beginning December 1, 2026". If you are studying from the DVA-C02 guide, read what changed first. This guide supersedes the C02 guide.

Sources (read 2026-11-07): 📖 AWS Certified Developer - Associate - Exam details; 📖 DVA-C03 Exam Guide - Official content outline

Exam Overview

DVA-C03 validates the ability to develop, test, deploy and debug AWS cloud applications, now including AI-assisted development tools. The target candidate has 1 or more years of hands-on experience developing and maintaining applications on AWS, and is proficient in at least one high-level programming language.

Item Value Source
Exam code DVA-C03 Exam guide
Duration 130 minutes AWS certification page
Questions 65 total: 50 scored plus 15 unscored AWS certification page (65) and exam guide (50 scored, 15 unscored)
Question types Multiple choice and multiple response Exam guide
Scoring Scaled 100-1,000; minimum passing score 720; compensatory (pass the exam overall, not each section) Exam guide
Cost 150 USD (additional costs may apply) AWS certification page
Delivery Pearson VUE testing center or online proctored exam AWS certification page
Validity 3 years; recertify by passing the latest exam version or earning DevOps Engineer - Professional AWS certification page

Exam Domains

Domain Weight (scored content) C02 weight Notes
1. Development with AWS Services 30% 32% 01 - Development with AWS Services
2. Security 26% 26% 02 - Security
3. Testing and Deployment 22% 24% ("Deployment") 03 - Testing and Deployment
4. Troubleshooting and Optimization 22% 18% 04 - Troubleshooting and Optimization

What changed from DVA-C02

From AWS's own comparison page (📖 Comparison of DVA-C02 and DVA-C03):

New content - A whole new task, 2.3: identify and mitigate security risks of using and integrating AI services (access, data privacy, input and output filtering, agent interactions, log protection). - 1.1: AI-assisted development tools (generate, review and optimize code) and integrating managed AWS AI services. - 2.1: presigned URLs for secure, time-limited access (S3, CloudFront). - 3.1: build and manage container images (ECR, Dockerfiles, tagging, lifecycle policies). - 3.2: AWS AI tools to generate tests and automate testing workflows. - 3.3: deploy containerized applications (ECS task definitions, EKS manifests, Fargate launch types, rolling updates) and AI tools in CI/CD. - 4.1 and 4.3: AI tools for error analysis and optimization.

Moved between domains (same scope, different place): unit testing with SAM (1 to 3), Lambda performance tuning (1 to 4), serializing and deserializing data (task 1.3 to 1.1), API Gateway stages and custom domains (3.4 to 3.1), IaC templates (stays in 3.3).

Consolidated: four DynamoDB skills became one; encryption plus sensitive data (13 skills) became one task of 7; test plus test automation (11) became one task of 5; observability 8 to 5; optimization 9 to 6. AWS states this does not reduce emphasis on essential skills.

Not named in C03's list of removals: AWS's comparison page lists no deleted topics for DVA, only additions, moves and consolidations.

Explicitly out of scope (exam guide): designing architectures, designing CI/CD pipelines, administering IAM users and groups, administering servers, selecting foundation models, engineering prompts and designing RAG, designing AI safety frameworks, ETL pipelines and AWS networking infrastructure.

Study Materials

Notes (study order)

Study Resources

Official Resources

After This Cert