AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01)

Want to demonstrate your ability to implement data pipelines and monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize cost and performance in AWS? The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) is designed to do just that. In this article, I'll cover frequently asked questions about the DEA-C01, so you can decide whether or not it's a fit for you, and be prepared for what to expect.

All about the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01)

If you’ve got eight minutes, I’d highly recommend watching this video by AWS certified training architect David Blocker which breaks down everything you need to know about the exam. But if you’re more into reading rather than listening, you can find the same information down below.

What is the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate?

The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate is an intermediate cloud certification intended for people who perform data engineer roles, or want to prove they can perform the tasks required for these roles. 

How hard is the DEA-C01 exam?

The exam for the Data Engineer - Associate is considered harder than a regular associate-level exam, often described as a mini-specialty test. There's a reason for this! This exam actually replaced an actual specialty exam (The  AWS Data Analytics - Specialty), and so some of that difficulty has actually carried over.

The other reasons this exam is challenging is because of the deep service knowledge for tools like Amazon Glue, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, and others, as well as when not to use them.

What should I expect in the DEA-C01 exam?

In this exam, you need to answer 85 detailed scenario-based questions across the course of 170 minutes. The questions are all multiple choice or multiple response:

• Multiple choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (Distractors)

• Multiple response: Has two or more correct responses out of five or more response options.

Does the DEA-C01 have labs?

No, there's no labs in the DEA-C01. It's all multiple choice or multiple response questions.

What's the pass score of the DEA-C01 exam?

The minimum passing score is 720 of a possible 1000 points. It's important to know that doesn't translate to 72%, because the passing score is calculated based on your ability to answer the questions and the difficulty of the questions.

It’s also important to point out that points are never deducted. You should answer every question, even if you need to guess.

Are there any prerequisites for the DEA-C01?

None at all. AWS recommends you have two to three years of experience in data engineering, and at least one to two years of AWS experience. However, with enough study and hands-on experience, you could take it regardless.

Can I take the DEA-C01 exam multiple times?

If you fail any AWS exam—not just the DEA-C01—you’ve got to wait 14 calendar days before you can take it again. There’s no limit on exam attempts, except for your wallet, which will start to sting a lot if you retry too many times! That’s because you’ve got to pay the full registration fee for each exam attempt.

What are the exam domains for the DEA-C01?

• Domain 1: Data Ingestion and Transformation (34%)

• Domain 2: Data Store Management (26%)

• Domain 3: Data Operations and Support (22%)

• Domain 4: Data Security and Governance (18%)

For a full breakdown of these domains, check out AWS’s official exam guide.

What are the key services I should know going into the exam?

1. AWS Glue

AWS Glue is the most widely covered service on the exam. Glue is a fully managed serverless data integration service that can catalog data from many services and deliver them to your data lake or data warehouse. You can also query catalog data directly as a single source. 

For this exam, you’ll need to be very familiar with AWS Glue, including Glue crawlers, jobs, workflows, Glue Studio, and Glue DataBrew.

2. Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Redshift can be used to gain business insights on vast amounts of data moments after it’s uploaded. 

For this exam, you’ll need to understand Redshift clusters, Redshift security, Redshift Streaming Ingestion, Redshift Serverless, and Redshift Spectrum.

3. Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service designed to easily analyze data stored in your S3 buckets. With Athena, you can run ad hoc SQL queries against structured, semi-structured, and even unstructured data. You can even query Glue data catalogs and use Athena as a source for data visualization in Amazon Quicksight. Athena is fully serverless, and a great solution if you want to run ad hoc or infrequent queries against data that resides in S3.

For this exam, you’ll need to understand Athena Integrations, Athena Notebooks, and how to leverage query results. You’ll also need to know when to use Athena over Redshift, and how to create new tables from the results of Athena queries.

4. Amazon S3

An oldie but goodie, Amazon S3 is all over the exam, which is unsurprising given it’s the foundation of data storage on AWS. 

In addition to its interactions with other services, you’ll need to know S3’s features inside and out. You’ll also need to know about data security and encryption, S3 storage classes, Data Lake management, and how to use S3 endpoints in your VPC.

5. Amazon EMR

Amazon EMR, or Elastic MapReduce, is a big data solution for transforming and analyzing petabytes of data. EMR can integrate with multiple data sources, and leverages open source tools like Spark and Hive to perform data workloads.

You’ll need to know when it’s more appropriate to use Glue, how to achieve cost savings, and how to create a hive metatable in EMR.

6. Lake Formation, Kinesis Data Streams, Step Functions

These are all services that are heavily featured in the exam, so you should also be familiar with these before you decide to sit it.

How much does the DEA-C01 exam cost?

The exam costs $150 USD. You’ll want to check the official exam pricing page for additional cost information, as well as foreign exchange rates. 

How soon will I get the results for taking the DEA-C01?

Unlike the AWS Cloud Practitioner, you don’t get the results for the AWS Data Engineer - Associate right after the exam (And this is a shame, since it would be great to know right away!) Instead, you’ve got to wait for AWS to send you an email to find out if you’ve passed or failed. Officially, this takes about five business days from completing the exam, but many people get it a lot sooner

Do I need to sit the DEA-C01 exam remotely or in a facility?

You can do either. Some people prefer to take it in their home office if it's clean and distraction free, so long as they're okay with the proctor having strong opinions on where your phone is and other things in your space. However, sitting exams in facilities can be preferable because you don't have to worry about things like having to open task manager and shut down conflicting programs that were clashing with the exam software.

Here’s what I’d recommend:

• Sit your exam remotely if you’ve got a good home office setup where nobody is going to walk in or make lots of background noise, you’ve successfully tested the exam software, and you’re moderately confident your internet won’t cut out.

• Sit your exam in a facility if you’ve got a cluttered home setup, lots of people or kids wandering around, and the idea of random disasters like the internet cutting out makes you break out in a cold sweat.

And hey, even if the worst happens, you’ll get a good story out of it.

What learning resources are available for the DEA-C01?

The easiest way to study for the DEA-C01 is to take Pluralsight's AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) learning path. It covers everything you need to know to study and pass the exam on your first time, authored by long-term AWS experts who have aced certs like these multiple times. 

As with any AWS certification, I'd also highly recommend reviewing the AWS Data Engineer - Associate exam guide.

If you take it, good luck with passing the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate! The very fact you're reading this guide means that you're already on the right path. You've got this!