Complete study library — 9 guides covering the full DVA-C02 topic map. Each service guide follows the same structure: Overview → Components → Exam Logic → Integrations → Best Practices & Traps → Hands-On Lab → Flashcards → Quiz. Built for scenario reasoning, not memorisation.
Clusters, services, tasks, task definitions. Task role vs task execution role — the single most common ECS IAM trap. ECS vs EKS vs Fargate vs EC2 launch type.
Source → Build → Test → Deploy. buildspec.yml, appspec.yml, in-place vs blue/green. CodeCommit and CodeStar are deprecated for new customers — flagged clearly, not presented as current.
Stacks, change sets, intrinsic functions, drift detection. How SAM and CDK both synthesize down to CloudFormation, and when to reach for each.
Rolling, rolling with additional batch, immutable, blue/green. Beanstalk vs ECS/Fargate vs Lambda — the "least ops but still need infra control" decision.
REST API vs HTTP API. Lambda proxy vs non-proxy integration. Authorizers (Cognito/IAM/Lambda), usage plans, throttling, and the CORS-is-usually-a-backend-header-problem trap.
User Pools (authentication) vs Identity Pools (temporary AWS credentials via STS). ID token vs access token vs refresh token — a frequent JWT trap.
Traces, segments, service maps, sampling rules. Annotations vs metadata — indexed/searchable vs not — one of the most reliable single-fact exam traps.
Containerised app, serverless API, CI/CD pipeline, enterprise deployment, secure app with auth+observability — plus the full MUST/SHOULD/NICE-TO-KNOW matrix and recommended study sequence.
Build a real Fargate service behind an ALB, wire a blue/green CodePipeline, deploy a SAM app, secure an HTTP API with a Cognito authorizer, and trace it all with X-Ray.
Overview → Components → Exam Logic → Integrations → Best Practices & Traps → Hands-On Lab → Flashcards → Quiz. The Hands-On Lab tab in each guide (01–07) gives you eu-west-1 console+CLI exercises specific to that service; file 09 is the cross-service capstone that chains several services together in one build.The highest-leverage topic per guide. Full topic-by-topic breakdown lives in file 08's Priorities tab — this is the condensed version.
| Guide | Top MUST KNOW item | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| 01 Containers | Task role vs task execution role; awsvpc networking + ALB target type ip | MUST |
| 02 CI/CD | buildspec.yml / appspec.yml mechanics; in-place vs blue/green by target type | MUST |
| 03 IaC | CloudFormation vs SAM vs CDK — when to use each | MUST |
| 04 Elastic Beanstalk | Deployment policies (rolling/immutable/blue-green) and their risk/speed tradeoffs | MUST |
| 05 X-Ray | Annotations vs metadata — indexed/searchable vs not | MUST |
| 06 API Gateway | REST API vs HTTP API; Lambda proxy vs non-proxy integration | MUST |
| 07 Cognito | User Pools vs Identity Pools; ID token vs access token vs refresh token | MUST |
Follows real dependencies — containers introduce IaC/CI/CD vocabulary informally before those guides cover it formally.
Containers (01) — establishes ECS/ECR/Fargate vocabulary that CI/CD, IaC, and file 08 all assume.
CI/CD (02) — builds directly on the container deployment target from step 1.
IaC (03) — now that you've deployed manually and via a pipeline, IaC's value is concrete.
Elastic Beanstalk (04) — a natural contrast point: same outcome, different operational model.
API Gateway (06) — shifts focus to the request-facing layer; needed before Cognito makes full sense.
Cognito (07) — layers directly onto API Gateway's authorizer concept just learned in step 5.
X-Ray (05) — studied last among the service guides; most useful once you have real request chains in mind to trace.
Cross-Service Architectures (08) — synthesises all seven guides into the five patterns the exam actually tests.
Hands-On Lab (09) — closes the loop by building real versions of these architectures in the console.