Serverless, Data and Event-Driven Patterns
This topic covers Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, streams, event sources, concurrency, ordering, and stateful application design.
How to study for AWS Developer Associate
Treat each question as an application delivery scenario: identify the service integration, permission boundary, deployment path, and operational signal before choosing an answer.
Core concepts
Concept 1
Serverless, Data and Event-Driven Patterns questions test AWS developer decisions in code, deployment, security, and operations.
Exam cue: Identify the runtime, integration point, data store, permission boundary, and deployment path in the scenario.
Concept 2
The strongest answer maps the application requirement to the managed AWS service feature that reduces custom code and operational risk.
Exam cue: Choose the AWS service behavior that satisfies the requirement with secure defaults and measurable failure handling.
Concept 3
Eliminate options that expose credentials, bypass least privilege, ignore throttling, or trade observability for convenience.
Exam cue: Prefer managed retries, idempotency, IAM roles, encryption, tracing, and staged release controls when the prompt calls for them.
Risk pitfalls and guardrails
Hard-coding credentials, secrets, or endpoints when AWS provides role-based or managed configuration options.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that hard-code secrets, skip IAM roles, ignore retry behavior, hide failures, or deploy unversioned code directly to production.
Choosing a compute or messaging pattern without considering retry behavior, ordering, idempotency, or concurrency.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that hard-code secrets, skip IAM roles, ignore retry behavior, hide failures, or deploy unversioned code directly to production.
Treating logs, metrics, and traces as afterthoughts instead of exam-tested troubleshooting evidence.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that hard-code secrets, skip IAM roles, ignore retry behavior, hide failures, or deploy unversioned code directly to production.
Memory anchors
Lambda Concurrency
Lambda concurrency controls how many function instances can run at the same time.
Reserved Concurrency
Reserved concurrency guarantees capacity for one Lambda function and caps its maximum concurrent executions.
DynamoDB Partition Key
A DynamoDB partition key determines item distribution and is central to scalable access patterns.
DynamoDB Conditional Write
A conditional write updates data only when an expression is true, protecting against conflicting changes.
S3 Event Notification
An S3 event notification can invoke Lambda or send events when object actions occur.
SQS Visibility Timeout
SQS visibility timeout hides a message after receipt so another consumer does not process it immediately.
SQS Dead-Letter Queue
An SQS dead-letter queue captures messages that exceed the configured receive count.
SNS Fanout
SNS fanout publishes one message to multiple subscribers such as queues, functions, or HTTP endpoints.
Kinesis Shard
A Kinesis shard provides ordered throughput capacity for records that share a partition key.
DynamoDB Streams
DynamoDB Streams capture item-level changes for event-driven processing.
Checkpoint rule
Do the check-up only after you can summarize each concept in one sentence and identify one dangerous pitfall from memory.
Knowledge Check (after reading)
Short check-up to confirm understanding of this module.
Check-up Questions
A Lambda function needs to query an RDS database that has only private VPC addresses. What must be configured?
A VPC-connected Lambda function can reach a private database but cannot call a public third-party API. What networking component is likely missing?
Answer all questions to submit.
Next step personalized recommendations
Continue learning
Move forward only after this module is stable.
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