Solutions Architect Associate vs Developer Associate
These are siblings rather than steps. Same price, same level, same length, and they point at different jobs.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate
$150
DVA-C02 retires on 30 November 2026, and is bookable until then. DVA-C03 replaces it. We have not written questions for it yet.
Solutions Architect is about arranging services to meet a requirement. Developer is about writing and shipping code that runs on them.
Side by side
| Solutions Architect Associate | Developer Associate | |
|---|---|---|
| Exam cost | $150. | $150. |
| Experience assumed | One year designing on AWS. | One year developing on AWS with at least one high-level language. |
| What it tests | Service selection, availability, cost optimisation, security posture. | SDKs, deployment, CI/CD, application integration, debugging. |
| Coding expected | None. You choose services, you do not write against them. | Yes. Questions assume you have called an API and handled its errors. |
| Study time | Eight to twelve weeks. | Eight to twelve weeks. |
| Difficulty | Scenario-heavy. Several answers work, one is best for the constraint. | Comparable, with more detail about specific service behaviour. |
| Typical roles | Cloud engineer, solutions architect, DevOps, platform engineer. | Backend developer, application engineer, serverless developer. |
| Market recognition | The most widely requested AWS certification. | Requested less often, and more specifically. |
| Renewal | Three years. | Three years. |
Which one to take first
Solutions Architect if you are not sure. It appears in more postings, covers more of the platform, and is the default AWS credential that hiring managers recognise without thinking.
Developer Associate if you write application code and expect to keep doing so. It goes deeper on the services you actually call, and Solutions Architect will spend weeks on networking and storage design you will never own.
Holding both is common and reasonable, because the overlap is large enough that the second one is considerably less work than the first.
When the answer is the other one
Take Developer Associate instead if you are a software engineer
Solutions Architect spends significant weight on VPC design, storage classes and account structure. If those decisions are made by a platform team and you consume the result, that is a third of an exam aimed at somebody else's role, and DVA covers what you touch daily.
Take CloudOps Engineer instead if you run the systems
SOA-C03 is the operations sibling of these two: monitoring, deployment, reliability and incident response rather than design or development. For somebody on call for AWS workloads it is closer to the job than either.
Take Cloud Practitioner first if AWS is entirely new
Both of these assume a year of AWS exposure and neither teaches the fundamentals. Starting here without that background means learning the platform and sitting an associate exam at the same time, which is the usual reason people fail twice.
The short version
Unsure, or infrastructure-facing: Solutions Architect Associate.
Writing application code on AWS: Developer Associate, and the overlap makes the other one cheap later.
Frequently asked questions
Is one harder than the other?
They sit at the same level and most people find them comparable. Developer Associate feels harder to those without coding experience; Solutions Architect feels harder to those without infrastructure experience.
Do they overlap?
Substantially. Both cover IAM, S3, EC2, VPC basics and the shared responsibility model. Holding one makes the other noticeably less work.
Which do employers ask for?
Solutions Architect Associate appears in far more postings and is treated as the general-purpose AWS credential. Developer Associate is requested more specifically, usually by teams building on serverless.
Answer a few from each.
Free sample questions for both, with the full explanation on every answer. Nothing tells you which exam suits you like sitting a few of its questions.