AWS - Data Engineer Associate (DEA-C01)

The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) exam validates the ability to implement data pipelines on AWS and to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize them for cost and performance in accordance with AWS best practices. The exam assesses knowledge across four content domains: ingesting and transforming data plus orchestrating pipelines with programming concepts; choosing an optimal data store, designing data models, cataloging schemas, and managing data lifecycles; operationalizing, maintaining, and monitoring pipelines including data analysis and data quality; and applying authentication, authorization, data encryption, privacy, and governance with logging. Candidates are expected to demonstrate working knowledge of AWS data services such as AWS Glue, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, Amazon S3, AWS Lake Formation, AWS Glue Data Catalog, AWS Step Functions, Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA), AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and related services, along with open table formats (Apache Iceberg), vector index concepts (HNSW, IVF), and large language model integration patterns for data processing.