I passed the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate Exam on November 22nd, 2024, and during my study journey I created the following notes.
I hope they are useful to you 😊
- Amazon Athena
- Amazon EMR
- AWS Glue
- AWS Lake Formation
- Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
- Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
- Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink
- Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
- Amazon OpenSearch Service
- Amazon QuickSight
- Amazon AppFlow
- Amazon EventBridge
- Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA)
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
- AWS Step Functions
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
- Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
- Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
- Amazon Neptune
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon Redshift
- AWS CLI
- AWS Cloud9
- AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)
- AWS CodeBuild
- AWS CodeCommit
- AWS CodeDeploy
- AWS CodePipeline
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS CloudTrail
- Amazon CloudWatch
- AWS Config
- Amazon Managed Grafana
- AWS Systems Manager
- AWS Well-Architected Tool
- AWS Application Discovery Service
- AWS Application Migration Service
- AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
- AWS DataSync
- AWS Snow Family
- AWS Transfer Family
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
- Amazon Macie
- AWS Secrets Manager
- AWS Shield
- AWS WAF
- AWS Backup
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
- Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
- Amazon S3
The difficulty level is moderate but can feel challenging if you're not familiar with services like Redshift, Glue, S3, and Athena. The exam requires a deep understanding of these services and their integration in designing optimal ETL workflows and database solutions on AWS.
This exam isn't just for Data Engineers. I recommend it to MLOps, Database Engineers, Cloud Engineers, DevOps professionals, and anyone working with data on AWS.
It's possible to take this as your first AWS certification, especially if you're a Data Engineer. However, I recommend starting with the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate to build a foundational understanding of AWS services.
It depends on your level of expertise. For me, it took about 40 hours to review the exam content and complete practice tests. If you're already working as a Data Engineer with AWS, I'd recommend focusing on reviewing key concepts and spending most of your time on practice exams.