DVA-C03 Exam Guide Is Out: New Domains, Weights and What to Study Now
AWS has published the full DVA-C03 exam guide for AWS Certified Developer Associate. In September we only had domain names, weights and a list of themes. Now there are real task statements, a skill by skill comparison with DVA-C02, and updated in-scope and out-of-scope service lists. If you were holding off on a study plan until the details landed, this is the update you were waiting for.
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DVA-C03 domains and official weights
| Domain | DVA-C02 | DVA-C03 |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Development with AWS Services | 32% | 30% |
| 2. Security | 26% | 26% |
| 3. Testing and Deployment (C02: Deployment) | 24% | 22% |
| 4. Troubleshooting and Optimization | 18% | 22% |
The weights match what AWS shared in September, so nothing moved at the last minute. Still four domains. Development drops two points, Deployment becomes Testing and Deployment and also drops two, and Troubleshooting and Optimization gains four. Security stays at 26% but gets a whole new task. We covered the early picture in DVA-C02 to DVA-C03: what’s changing and which exam to take, written before the detailed guide existed. This post picks up where that one stopped.
What is actually new in the guide
The comparison page in the guide lists every addition. The short version:
- New Task 2.3, security of AI services. Five skills: requesting and managing access to AI services, sending data to AI services with privacy controls (VPC endpoints, making sure inputs and outputs are not used for model training), filtering model inputs and outputs (content filters, PII and PHI redaction, denied topics, prompt injection protection), securing AI agent interactions (tool-use authorization, session isolation, human-in-the-loop approval for sensitive actions), and keeping sensitive content out of monitoring logs.
- AI-assisted development across the domains. Using AI tools to generate, review and optimize code (Task 1.1), integrating managed AWS AI services into apps (Task 1.1), generating tests and automating regression testing (Task 3.2), supporting CI/CD workflows (Task 3.3), analyzing errors (Task 4.1) and finding optimization opportunities (Task 4.3).
- Containers. Building and managing images with Amazon ECR (Dockerfiles, tagging, lifecycle policies) in Task 3.1, and deploying with Amazon ECS task definitions, Amazon EKS manifests, AWS Fargate and rolling updates in Task 3.3.
- Presigned URLs. Time-limited access with Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront is now spelled out in Task 2.1.
New names in the in-scope list include Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Quick, Kiro, Amazon Data Firehose and AWS PrivateLink. Amazon SageMaker AI and Strands Agents are listed as out of scope.
What moved or got merged
Some content did not disappear, it just lives somewhere else now. Unit testing with AWS SAM moved from Task 1.1 to Task 3.2. Lambda performance tuning moved from Task 1.2 to Task 4.3. Serializing and deserializing data moved from Task 1.3 to Task 1.1. API Gateway stages and custom domains moved from Task 3.4 to Task 3.1.
AWS also merged a lot of small skills. The four separate DynamoDB skills (partition keys, consistency, query vs scan, keys and indexes) are now one skill. Encryption and sensitive data went from 13 skills over two tasks to 7 skills in one task. Testing went from 11 skills to 5. AWS says this does not reduce emphasis, and I would take that at face value: DynamoDB is still all there, it is just written as one line.
Exam format
From the guide and the certification page: 65 questions (50 scored, 15 unscored), 130 minutes, scaled score 100 to 1,000 with a passing score of 720, and compensatory scoring, so you pass the exam as a whole, not each domain. Question types are multiple choice and multiple response. The price is $150 USD and you sit it through Pearson VUE, at a test center or online.
The target candidate has one or more years of hands-on experience building and maintaining applications on AWS. The guide is clear about what you are not expected to do: design architectures, design and create CI/CD pipelines, administer IAM users and groups, select foundation models, write prompts or design RAG architectures, or design AI guardrails and governance. You use AI tools and secure AI calls in your code. You are not the person designing the AI platform.
Key dates
- 27 Oct 2026: DVA-C03 registration opened and the updated exam guide was released
- 30 Nov 2026: last day to take DVA-C02
- 1 Dec 2026: DVA-C03 delivery begins
AWS’s advice is simple. If you are ready, take DVA-C02 by 30 November. Your certification stays active until its normal expiry date, so the old version is not worth less. If you are early in your prep, or you already use AI coding tools and Bedrock at work, C03 is the better fit. Slots close to a retirement date fill up, so book early either way.
How I would study from here
- Read the official guide, task statements first. Then the comparison page and the in-scope service list. That is the syllabus. Everything else, this post included, is commentary.
- Do not drop the classics. Lambda configuration, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, API Gateway, IAM roles, KMS and CodeDeploy still make up most of the task statements. The AI content sits on top of that, it does not replace it.
- Give Troubleshooting and Optimization more time than you would for C02. It went from 18% to 22%. Practice reading CloudWatch logs and metrics, X-Ray traces, and fixing Lambda concurrency and memory issues.
- Build one small app that touches the new tasks. For example: a Lambda function that calls Bedrock through a VPC endpoint, applies a content filter, keeps prompts out of the logs, ships as a container image in ECR and deploys to ECS on Fargate with a rolling update. One afternoon like that covers a surprising amount of the new material.
- Skip what is out of scope. No prompt engineering courses, no long RAG design courses, no SageMaker AI notebooks. That time is better spent on IAM and DynamoDB questions.
Practice
Our DVA-C03 question set is in progress and will be live before the new exam starts on December 1, 2026. Until then, the AWS Developer Associate practice exam follows DVA-C02 (300 questions across the four domains, timed 65-question attempts in 130 minutes), and most of it carries over to C03. That makes it a good fit if you are sitting C02 before 30 November. You can start with a $1 trial, which is deducted when you upgrade, and there is a 14-day money-back guarantee. Or try the free sample exam quiz first.
Sources: the official AWS DVA-C03 exam guide and its comparison of DVA-C02 and DVA-C03 (domains, weights, tasks, format, scope), the AWS blog announcing registration (27 October 2026) and the September 2026 AWS Training and Certification update (timeline, format and price). Recheck those pages before you book.
