DVA-C03 study resources: free official
The best free resources for DVA-C03 are the official ones: AWS’s exam page, the exam guide, AWS documentation and the exam-preparation steps AWS lists on its certification page, supported by hands-on work in your own AWS account. This page lists them in the order they are most useful and says plainly what is available now and what is not.
1. The AWS exam page
The AWS Certified Developer - Associate page is the source for fees, duration, languages, recommended experience and dates. As checked on 30 October 2026, it lists the 150 USD fee, 130 minutes, 65 questions, languages and three-year validity, but gives no registration or delivery dates; those are in the exam guide and the AWS blog (see below). Check it before booking, since details can change.
2. The exam guide
AWS publishes exam guides in its documentation, and the DVA-C03 exam guide is now live. It is the authoritative list of task statements, with the domains and weights (30/26/22/22), the in-scope and out-of-scope service lists, and a comparison page with DVA-C02 that lists additions, moved topics and consolidations. Read it fully; it takes precedence over any secondary summary, including the ones on this site.
A note at the top of the guide says registration for DVA-C03 opens December 1, 2026 and that the last day for DVA-C02 is November 30, 2026, while AWS’s blog post of 27 October 2026 says registration is open. Check your AWS Certification account for the dates you can book. The DVA-C02 guide is still available for the outgoing exam.
3. AWS announcement for the update
AWS’s training and certification blog has a September 2026 post on the update and a post of 27 October 2026, Register now: Updated Developer Associate and Solutions Architect Professional exams, which links the DVA-C03 exam guide and an Exam Prep Plan on AWS Skill Builder. The guide’s comparison page covers what changed; compare the DVA-C03 vs DVA-C02 page with it.
4. AWS documentation
The service documentation is the most accurate free source, and developer questions depend on behaviour that summaries flatten. Prioritise:
| Area | What to read |
|---|---|
| Lambda | Event source mappings, concurrency, timeouts, versions and aliases, error handling |
| API Gateway | Integration types, authorisers, stages, caching, throttling |
| DynamoDB | Key design, indexes, capacity modes, transactions, consistency |
| Messaging | SQS visibility timeout and dead-letter queues, SNS filtering, EventBridge rules |
| Security | IAM policy evaluation, STS, KMS key policies and envelope encryption, Secrets Manager, Cognito |
| Delivery | CodeBuild, CodeDeploy deployment configurations, CloudFormation, AWS SAM |
| Observability | CloudWatch Logs Insights and alarms, X-Ray tracing |
| Containers | Amazon ECR images and deployment on ECS, EKS and Fargate, since the guide adds container image and orchestration skills |
| AI services | Amazon Bedrock and Bedrock AgentCore access control and data privacy, PrivateLink and VPC endpoints, as Task 2.3 draws on them |
Prefer the developer guides and the FAQ-style pages over marketing pages. Read the “quotas” and “troubleshooting” sections; limits and error causes are common question material.
5. AWS Skill Builder exam preparation
AWS’s certification page lists a preparation path on AWS Skill Builder: learn the exam style with the Official Practice Question Set and the exam guide, fill knowledge gaps with digital courses, AWS Builder Labs, AWS Cloud Quest and AWS Jam, review with exam-style questions, flashcards and AWS SimuLearn, and assess readiness with the Official Practice Exam. Which of these items are free and which need a subscription varies by item and can change, so check each on Skill Builder. AWS’s 27 October 2026 blog post links a DVA-C03 Exam Prep Plan on Skill Builder (skillbuilder.aws); this page has not checked which items in it are free, and does not confirm that every item in the list above has a DVA-C03 version.
6. Your own AWS account
Reading covers vocabulary; building covers judgement. Use the AWS Free Tier where it applies, set a budget alert, and delete resources after each session. Useful builds:
- A serverless API with authentication, a table and a queue.
- A CI/CD pipeline that deploys to a test stage and rolls back.
- A function whose logs and traces you inspect after causing an error on purpose.
- A least-privilege role you test by making a call it should not be allowed to make.
7. This site
Use the study plan, the sample questions and the general advice in how to study for certification exams. Practice questions are a check on understanding, not a source of facts; when you miss one, go to the documentation to learn the rule.
What to avoid
Avoid any material claiming to contain real exam questions. AWS candidates agree to an exam policy against sharing exam content, and such material is also unreliable. Avoid summaries of DVA-C03 whose domain weights or task statements differ from the AWS exam guide; they cannot be verified against a source.