Certification guide
The AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) is Amazon Web Services’ associate-level credential purpose-built for data engineers. It validates that you can build data ingestion and transformation pipelines, choose and manage the right data stores, operationalize and troubleshoot pipelines, and apply appropriate security and governance across the AWS data services stack — Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lake Formation, AWS Lambda, Amazon Athena, and the ecosystem around them.
The exam targets working data engineers with roughly two to three years of data engineering experience and one to two years of hands-on AWS. Prior AWS experience helps but is not required; the questions are scenario-based and test judgment — picking the best of several plausible AWS approaches, not memorizing service feature lists. Roughly 60 percent of items place you in a business situation and ask which service or architectural approach is most appropriate.
Exam code · DEA-C01 Level · Associate Questions · 65 Duration · 130 min Pass · 720 / 1000 Cost · $150 USDData Ingestion and Transformation
Domain 1 · 34%The heaviest domain by far. Ingest streaming and batch data using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Data Firehose, AWS DMS, Amazon MSK, Amazon AppFlow, AWS Transfer Family, and AWS DataSync. Transform and orchestrate with AWS Glue Spark, AWS Glue DataBrew, Amazon EMR, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, and Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow. Expect deep coverage of batch vs streaming trade-offs, file formats (Parquet, Avro, ORC), compression choices, partitioning, and the small-files problem.
Data Store Management
Domain 2 · 26%Choose the right store for the workload: Amazon S3 as the data lake foundation, Amazon Redshift for analytics, Amazon DynamoDB for OLTP key-value access, Amazon Aurora and RDS for relational, and Amazon OpenSearch for search. Design data models, catalog schemas with the AWS Glue Data Catalog and crawlers, and manage lifecycles with S3 storage classes, lifecycle rules, and open table formats (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Apache Hudi) for upserts, time travel, and schema evolution on the lake.
Data Operations and Support
Domain 3 · 22%Operationalize pipelines: Amazon CloudWatch metrics, logs, and dashboards; alerting via Amazon SNS; AWS Glue Data Quality (DQDL) for row counts, freshness, and completeness rules; error handling and retries in Step Functions; Spark tuning (broadcast joins, shuffle, spill diagnosis) on Amazon EMR and Glue; and Redshift query monitoring. This domain also covers reprocessing patterns, idempotency, and the difference between silent job success and real data-quality success.
Data Security and Governance
Domain 4 · 18%Authentication and authorization through AWS IAM roles and IAM Identity Center; fine-grained access with AWS Lake Formation (row, column, and cell-level filters); encryption with AWS KMS customer-managed keys; data classification and PII discovery with Amazon Macie; audit with AWS CloudTrail and Redshift audit logging; and network isolation via VPC endpoints, security groups, and private subnets. Retention and tamper-evidence use S3 Object Lock and lifecycle policies.
This practice exam mirrors the real AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate exam in shape and scenario style: 65 items per set, 130 minutes of working time, and a 72% (720/1000 scaled) pass mark. The pass mark on Certifym is set to the honest raw-score equivalent of the AWS scale — the scoring math varies by form on the real exam, but if you can hit 72% consistently across the sets here, you are prepared for the item mix on test day, not just the easy ones and not luck in the heavy ones.
AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate - Practice Exam
AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) practice bank on Certifym. 65 scenario-based questions aligned to the current AWS exam blueprint across all four content domains:…
Subscribe to startTrademark notice & independence. AWS, Amazon Web Services, and the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate credential are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Certifym and Certifym Exam Services, LLC are independent and are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by AWS. All references to the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) exam are for identification only.
All practice questions on Certifym are original content authored specifically for this platform. They are not drawn from any official AWS exam, and no attempt has been made to reproduce actual exam items. Passing this practice exam does not guarantee passing the official AWS certification exam.