DEA-C01 Exam Guide: Format, Cost, Domains, and How to Prepare
The AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) validates building and operating data pipelines on AWS — ingestion, transformation, storage, orchestration, and governance. It targets data engineers with hands-on pipeline experience.
This guide summarizes official exam details — confirm the current version on the AWS certification page before booking.
Exam format at a glance
- 65 questions — multiple choice and multiple response
- 130 minutes — about 2 minutes per question
- $150 USD
- Passing score: 720 on a scaled range of 100–1000
- Pearson VUE testing center or online proctored exam
The four domains
- Domain 1: Data Ingestion and Transformation — 34% (the largest — Glue, Kinesis, MSK, Firehose, DMS)
- Domain 2: Data Store Management — 26% (S3 data lakes, Redshift, DynamoDB, partitioning, lifecycle)
- Domain 3: Data Operations and Support — 22% (orchestration, monitoring, data quality)
- Domain 4: Data Security and Governance — 18% (Lake Formation, encryption, access control, catalog)
What the exam actually tests
DEA-C01 is pipeline-architecture focused. Expect 'which service/pattern ingests this data at this velocity' and 'how do you transform/store this efficiently' scenarios. The recurring themes: Glue ETL and crawlers vs EMR, Kinesis vs MSK vs Firehose for streaming, S3 partitioning + columnar formats (Parquet) for Athena/Redshift Spectrum query cost, MWAA vs Step Functions for orchestration, and Lake Formation for fine-grained lake access.
Data quality and schema evolution questions appear often — Glue Data Quality, schema registries, and handling schema drift are worth knowing concretely.
A realistic prep plan
Budget 5–8 weeks. Domain 1 alone is a third of the score — ingestion/transformation deserves the most time. Build one end-to-end mini pipeline if you can: Kinesis/Firehose → S3 → Glue → Athena is the exam's canonical shape.
- Weeks 1–2: Domain 1 — streaming vs batch ingestion, Glue jobs/crawlers, MSK vs Kinesis, Firehose, DMS
- Week 3: Domain 2 — S3 layout/partitioning, Parquet, Redshift distribution/sort keys, DynamoDB patterns
- Week 4: Domain 3 — MWAA/Step Functions orchestration, CloudWatch for pipelines, Glue Data Quality
- Week 5: Domain 4 — Lake Formation permissions, KMS encryption, Glue Data Catalog
- Final week: timed practice sets + review every missed option