DVA-C03 AWS Certified Developer Associate Practice Exams
Lambda, APIs, DynamoDB, security, AI security and CI/CD in 500 exam-style questions with full explanations
Are you ready for the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam, or do you only feel ready? These practice tests give you a clear answer before you book.
This practice set contains 500 original questions in five full practice tests of 100 questions each. They are built for the new DVA-C03 version of the exam, using the four domains, weightings and changes AWS announced in September 2026: Development with AWS Services (30%), Security (26%), Testing and Deployment (22%) and Troubleshooting and Optimization (22%). Every test follows those proportions as closely as 100 questions allow, so your domain scores add up meaningfully across attempts.
DVA-C03 replaces DVA-C02, which can be taken until 30 November 2026. The core developer skills remain, but the new exam adds AI-assisted development in every domain, a new task on securing AI services and agents (Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, access control, private connectivity, protecting sensitive data in logs), container workloads on Amazon ECR, ECS, EKS and Fargate, and services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Quick, Kiro, Amazon Data Firehose and AWS PrivateLink. Older DVA-C02 question banks miss these topics and still drill skills AWS has consolidated.
The five tests rise in difficulty:
- Test 1, Groundwork: one concept per question, short stems.
- Test 2, In Practice: short scenarios that separate easily confused services.
- Test 3, Trade-offs: two plausible answers, one deciding requirement.
- Test 4, Under the Hood: API operations, parameters, template properties and pipeline details.
- Test 5, Exam Day: long multi-constraint scenarios at the real exam's pace.
Every answer option has its own feedback explaining why it is right or wrong, and every question has an overall explanation with a link to official AWS documentation. Multiple-response questions appear in every test, as on the real exam.
After each attempt you see your score per domain. The pass mark is 80% for tests 1 to 4 and 85% for test 5, higher than the real exam requires, so passing here gives you a margin.
What this practice set is not: it is not a video course and it does not replace hands-on practice. It tests and explains; use it alongside AWS Skill Builder and the documentation. The DVA-C03 exam guide with detailed task statements is published by AWS; questions are reviewed against it and updated where needed.
Groundwork: Core Developer Services and Security Basics
100 questions · 240 minutes · pass mark 80%
Start here. This first test checks whether the foundations of the AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C03) exam are in place: Lambda configuration, API Gateway, SQS, SNS and EventBridge, DynamoDB keys and reads, Cognito, IAM roles, KMS, Secrets Manager, SAM and CodeDeploy basics, CloudWatch and tracing, plus the new DVA-C03 topics such as Amazon Bedrock Guardrails and AI-assisted development. Most questions test one concept with a short, direct stem. All four exam domains are covered in proportions close to the published weighting. You have 240 minutes for 100 questions, more time than the real exam, so you can think rather than race. The pass mark is 80%, deliberately higher than the real exam's scaled 720, so a pass here means your basics are solid rather than just good enough. Take it cold as a baseline, then read every explanation, including those for questions you answered correctly.
In Practice: Everyday Developer Scenarios on AWS
100 questions · 230 minutes · pass mark 80%
Test 2 moves from definitions to short, practical developer scenarios. Each question describes a small real-world situation and asks which service, feature or setting fits. The focus is on neighbours that are easy to confuse: SQS versus SNS versus EventBridge, Kinesis Data Streams versus Amazon Data Firehose, Cognito user pools versus identity pools, Secrets Manager versus Parameter Store, Lambda destinations versus dead-letter queues, and the Elastic Beanstalk and CodeDeploy deployment options. AI security, Amazon Q Developer and container questions on ECR and ECS are included. All four DVA-C03 domains appear in proportions close to the published weighting. You have 230 minutes for 100 questions and the pass mark is 80%. After each attempt, check your score per domain and revisit the explanations for the domain where you lost the most points.
Trade-offs: Choosing Between Defensible Designs
100 questions · 220 minutes · pass mark 80%
In test 3 two answers often look right. A single requirement in the scenario decides which one wins: ordering, exactly-once processing, latency, cost, least privilege, cross-account access or the least operational overhead. This is how many real DVA-C03 questions are built, and it is where well-prepared candidates still lose points. Expect choices such as direct service integrations versus Lambda glue code, provisioned concurrency versus SnapStart, AWS managed keys versus customer managed keys, canary versus linear traffic shifting, and caching at API Gateway versus CloudFront versus ElastiCache. Stems are longer and every detail matters. You have 220 minutes for 100 questions and the pass mark is 80%. Read the explanation for every distractor: knowing why the second-best answer fails is the skill this test trains.
Under the Hood: APIs, Parameters and Pipeline Details
100 questions · 210 minutes · pass mark 80%
Test 4 goes into the details a developer types every day: API operations and their parameters, SDK behaviour, SAM and CloudFormation properties, buildspec phases, AppSpec lifecycle hooks, CodeDeploy deployment configurations, DynamoDB ReturnValues and capacity calculations, SQS FIFO attributes, Lambda event source mapping settings, KMS operations, CloudWatch Logs Insights syntax and the Bedrock Converse API. Questions are shorter but precise, and close-enough answers are wrong. All four DVA-C03 domains appear in proportions close to the published weighting. You have 210 minutes for 100 questions and the pass mark is 80%. If your score drops here compared with test 3, that is normal: use the per-domain results to find which services you know conceptually but not yet at the level of names and values.
Exam Day: Full DVA-C03 Simulation
100 questions · 200 minutes · pass mark 85%
The final test simulates exam conditions. Questions use long, multi-constraint scenarios that mix domains, in the style of the real AWS exam: which solution meets these requirements with the least operational overhead, the lowest latency or the strongest security. The pace matches the real exam, two minutes per question, so 100 questions in 200 minutes. Take it in one uninterrupted sitting, without notes. The pass mark is 85%, higher than the earlier tests and well above what the real scaled score of 720 requires, because this is a readiness gate: if you pass comfortably here, your knowledge has a safety margin for exam-day nerves and unfamiliar wording. If you fall short, go back to your weakest domain, reread the explanations and retake the test after a few days.
What you will practice
- Test your readiness for the AWS DVA-C03 exam with 500 questions across all four domains, weighted close to the published exam weighting
- Distinguish confusable AWS developer services such as SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Kinesis and Firehose in realistic scenarios
- Apply DVA-C03 security skills: Cognito, IAM roles, KMS envelope encryption, secrets and the new AI security topics
- Learn from per-answer feedback that explains why each option is right or wrong, with a link to AWS documentation
- Spare: Build from fundamentals to a full exam-pace simulation through five tests of rising difficulty
- Spare: Find your weakest exam domain using per-domain results after every attempt
Exam domains covered
Who is this for
This practice set is for developers who plan to take the AWS Certified Developer - Associate exam in its new DVA-C03 version: backend and full-stack developers building on Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB, DevOps practitioners who own CI/CD pipelines, and IT professionals or career switchers moving into cloud development. It is also useful if you started preparing for DVA-C02, which can be taken until 30 November 2026: DVA-C03 keeps the same four domains but adds AI-assisted development across all domains, a new AI security task, containers on ECR, ECS, EKS and Fargate, and services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Quick and Amazon Data Firehose, while weighting troubleshooting and optimization more heavily. These are practice exams with detailed explanations; they test and explain, but they do not replace hands-on experience or a full course.
Requirements
- Basic programming experience in at least one language (for example Python, JavaScript, Java or C#) and familiarity with REST APIs, JSON and SDKs
- Some hands-on time with AWS helps a lot; the exam profile assumes about a year of building on AWS, but beginners can use the explanations to fill gaps
- These are practice tests, not a video course: use them alongside free official AWS Skill Builder material and the AWS documentation, not instead of it
Free exam guide
Not sure what to expect? Read how the exam is built, what it covers and how to prepare.