DEA-C01 · Free study guide

AWS Certified Data Engineer · Associate

For data engineers: you build pipelines that ingest, transform and store data on AWS, keep them running, and keep the data secure and governed.

Questions: 65 (50 scored)
Time: 130 minutes
Passing score: 720 / 1000
Level: Associate

What the exam covers

Domains and key topics

Domain 134% of the exam

Data Ingestion and Transformation

Batch vs. streaming ingestion: Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon MSK, DMS
Transformations with AWS Glue, Amazon EMR and Lambda
Orchestration: Step Functions, Amazon MWAA, Glue workflows, EventBridge
Programming concepts: SQL, infrastructure as code, CI/CD for pipelines

Official domain details ↗

Domain 226% of the exam

Data Store Management

Choosing a store: S3 data lake, Redshift, DynamoDB, RDS
Data catalogs: AWS Glue Data Catalog, crawlers, partitions
Lifecycle: S3 storage classes, lifecycle rules, retention and deletion
Data models, file formats (Parquet, ORC) and schema evolution

Official domain details ↗

Domain 322% of the exam

Data Operations and Support

Automating processing with managed services and scheduling
Analyzing data with Athena, Redshift and QuickSight
Monitoring pipelines with CloudWatch and logging
Data quality checks with AWS Glue Data Quality

Official domain details ↗

Domain 418% of the exam

Data Security and Governance

Authentication and authorization: IAM, Lake Formation permissions
Encryption with KMS and data masking
Audit logs with CloudTrail and CloudWatch Logs
Privacy and governance: Macie for sensitive data, data sharing controls

Official domain details ↗

Know these well

Key AWS services

Amazon S3

The data lake: partitions, formats and lifecycle.

AWS Glue

Serverless ETL, Data Catalog, crawlers and data quality.

Amazon Kinesis & Data Firehose

Streaming ingestion and delivery.

Amazon MSK

Managed Apache Kafka.

Amazon EMR

Big data processing with Spark and Hadoop.

Amazon Redshift

Data warehouse, Spectrum and data sharing.

Amazon Athena

Query S3 with SQL, no servers.

AWS Lake Formation

Fine-grained permissions on the data lake.

AWS Step Functions & Amazon MWAA

Pipeline orchestration.

AWS DMS

Move data from databases into AWS.

How to prepare

A simple study plan

1Read the official exam guide once, end to end.
2Draw one pipeline from source to dashboard and name the service at each step.
3Spend the most time on domain 1 (34%): ingestion and transformation choices.
4Learn when to choose Redshift, Athena, EMR or Glue for the same job.
5Take a timed practice exam and review every explanation, right and wrong.

Always check the official DEA-C01 exam guide ↗ for the current version of the exam.

Preparing for more than one exam?

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