This is a practical set of 16 AWS application-development labs originally associated with AWS Certified Developer \u2013 Associate DVA-C02. It remains useful for learning cloud development even as the exam is being updated. On October 27, 2026, AWS opened registration for DVA-C03; DVA-C02 testing ends November 30 and DVA-C03 general delivery begins December 1, 2026. Learners must use the objectives in effect for their own exam date rather than claim the new blueprint is already active.<\/p>\n
The newer assessment maintains four broad domains\u2014development with AWS services, security, testing and deployment, and troubleshooting and optimization\u2014while reflecting contemporary AI-assisted development practices. These labs focus on transferable service implementation and operational reasoning. They do not promise access to an official testing environment or disclose actual examination questions.<\/p>\n
Use an AWS account and Region where you are authorized to create resources. Set a budget alarm, tag every lab resource, use least-privilege access and record the expected configuration before provisioning. Some labs can incur charges for endpoints, storage, NAT gateways or running instances; finish with cleanup and confirm resources are deleted. Do not use production credentials or sensitive business data.<\/p>\n
For each lab, write down the success test and one deliberate failure case. The goal is not simply to reproduce a console screenshot. It is to understand permissions, request flow, logs, idempotency and what should happen when a dependency becomes unavailable.<\/p>\n
Lab 1 \u2014 Automate an Amazon Cognito user pool using Terraform or another supported infrastructure-as-code workflow. Define authentication configuration and required callback settings, then apply and review the plan. Test a basic sign-in for an authorized test user; inspect which resources can be safely recreated without invalidating clients. Remove sample accounts and the pool when finished.<\/p>\n
Lab 2 \u2014 Store an application secret in AWS Secrets Manager and access it from a narrowly scoped AWS Lambda execution role. Verify success and intentionally test denial when the resource ARN is not authorized. Avoid placing the secret in logs or source code. Rotating an example secret should trigger a documented update or supported retrieval behavior.<\/p>\n
Lab 3 \u2014 Configure server-side encryption for an S3 object using supported AWS KMS settings, then inspect CloudTrail evidence of related AWS API activity. Establish the difference between an S3 access permission and permission to use the selected KMS key. Test a controlled access denial to demonstrate that encryption and authorization are separate controls.<\/p>\n
Lab 4 \u2014 Connect an S3 object-created notification to an SNS topic and an authorized subscriber. Upload a harmless test object and confirm an expected event arrives. Then test repeated events or subscriber failure. Record what duplication means for a downstream consumer and remove the notification, subscriptions and topic afterward.<\/p>\n
Lab 5 \u2014 Connect Amazon SQS to a Lambda consumer. Configure an appropriate visibility timeout, batch size and dead-letter handling for a harmless workload. Test what happens when processing fails and a message is delivered again. Make the function idempotent rather than assuming a queue message is guaranteed to run only once.<\/p>\n
Lab 6 \u2014 Build a minimal API Gateway to Lambda integration returning a validated JSON response. Restrict the function’s execution permissions, test request validation, inspect logs and compare a successful call with an unauthorized or malformed request. The exercise is about the boundary between invocation rights, application authorization and error handling.<\/p>\n
Lab 7 \u2014 Write a Lambda function that uses DynamoDB for an idempotent event counter. Use a conditional write or suitable application key so repeated events do not inflate the count. Record the result of a duplicate request and compare it with an implementation that makes no attempt at deduplication.<\/p>\n
Lab 8 \u2014 Construct a small VPC with public and private subnets, route tables and security groups. Trace a request between intended resources and prove that an unauthorized source cannot connect. Avoid configuring a costly NAT gateway unless its behavior is the learning objective; a lab can validate routing with a smaller resource footprint.<\/p>\n
Lab 9 \u2014 Compare SQS access through a supported VPC interface endpoint with the network path the application would otherwise need. Review private DNS, endpoint permissions and resource policies. Demonstrate that an endpoint can establish connectivity while IAM still denies an unauthorized action.<\/p>\n
Lab 10 \u2014 Use an EC2 Spot Instance for a disposable worker that can be interrupted without losing critical state. Put durable work in a queue or other supported store. Simulate graceful termination where feasible and demonstrate how a replacement worker resumes work without double processing.<\/p>\n
Lab 11 \u2014 Configure an Auto Scaling group for a stateless demo service. Change demand or simulate an unhealthy instance and observe the desired-capacity response. Compare instance health with user-visible application availability; scaling cannot rescue state that exists only on an instance that was lost.<\/p>\n
Lab 12 \u2014 Set up an Application Load Balancer with an appropriate health check for the demo service. Test how routing changes when one target becomes unhealthy, and explain why a successful TCP connection is not proof that a database-backed transaction can complete. Remove listeners and targets during cleanup.<\/p>\n
Lab 13 \u2014 Define an infrastructure stack with CloudFormation and review the change set before deployment. Update a harmless parameter, examine the resulting changes and practice deleting the stack. Pay attention to retained resources and stateful components; deletion of an infrastructure definition must not unexpectedly destroy valuable data.<\/p>\n
Lab 14 \u2014 Build a CodePipeline flow that deploys reviewed application content. Restrict the pipeline service role, test a successful release and then introduce a controlled failing test stage. Confirm that the failure blocks deployment and that the previous working version remains usable.<\/p>\n
Lab 15 \u2014 Use CloudWatch Logs to inspect Lambda execution, including a harmless structured application log. Compare an error rate with a successful request and test a suitable alarm threshold. CloudWatch Logs Live Tail can assist interactive diagnosis when available, but it is not a permanent substitute for retained logs and actionable alerting.<\/p>\n
Lab 16 \u2014 Connect a Lambda function to an Amazon RDS test database using supported authentication and network settings. Validate connection reuse and error handling under concurrent invocation. In a disposable lab, test what happens when the database is briefly unreachable. Consider connection management and cleanup; do not expose database credentials in environment variable screenshots.<\/p>\n
Each lab should also record the IAM principal responsible for the action. When a Lambda function reads S3, distinguish the credentials of the developer deploying it from the execution role used at runtime. An exercise that succeeds only because a human administrator has broad access has not demonstrated a secure service architecture.<\/p>\n
A useful after-action note includes the input, expected result, observed result, failure condition, permissions used and exact cleanup confirmation. For a queue consumer, inspect whether a failed message was retried and whether a duplicate caused an additional write. For a web API, prove that malformed requests are rejected without exposing internal exception details.<\/p>\n
Before taking any updated examination, map the lab to the issuer’s active task statements rather than assuming every old lab is a current tested topic. The December 2026 Developer exam update includes AI-assisted development and agent interaction security, but it does not turn a lab collection into a course on training AI models. Keep that boundary visible.<\/p>\n
These exercises span core developer skills: designing services, secure access, testing failures, deploying repeatably and troubleshooting real logs. Record why each resource was needed, the least-privilege boundary and one alternate design. For example, a workload that needs ordered processing or more control over retry behavior may not be best served by a simple SNS-only event arrangement.<\/p>\n
The complementary AWS Developer Associate service concepts<\/a> helps relate individual experiments to broader development decisions, and serverless architectures with AWS Lambda and API Gateway<\/a> supplies additional context for service composition.<\/p>\n Before scheduling an exam, confirm whether the appointment is DVA-C02 or DVA-C03 and check the respective AWS official study guide. AI-assisted workflows in the updated exam require understanding safe generated-code review, permissions and testing, not merely using an assistant to paste unreviewed output.<\/p>\n A lab counts as completed when it demonstrates an expected response, a well-explained failure and verified resource cleanup. Sixteen carefully tested exercises provide practical engineering evidence that remains relevant after an exam version changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a practical set of 16 AWS application-development labs originally associated with AWS Certified Developer \u2013 Associate DVA-C02. It remains useful for learning cloud development even as the exam is being updated. On October 27, 2026, AWS opened registration for DVA-C03; DVA-C02 testing ends November 30 and DVA-C03 general delivery begins December 1, 2026. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1648,1649],"tags":[76,89,113,959,182],"class_list":["post-1815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-certifications","category-amazon","tag-associate","tag-aws","tag-developer","tag-practical-labs","tag-skills"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1815"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28080,"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions\/28080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.examlabs.com\/certification\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}