About This Study Plan
This 30-day study plan breaks the DEA-C01 (AWS Data Engineer Associate) exam preparation into 5 focused study sessions with a total of 29 actionable tasks. The plan covers all 4 exam domains — Data Ingestion and Transformation, Data Store Management, Data Operations and Support, Data Security and Governance — ensuring complete coverage of the exam blueprint. A month-long DEA-C01 plan covering all four domains of the AWS Data Engineer Associate exam.
Prerequisites
- Basic AWS cloud experience
- 1-2 hours of study time per day
- Optional AWS account for hands-on practice with Glue, Athena, and Redshift
Study Schedule
- Days 1-2: AWS Glue crawlers, Data Catalog, ETL jobs, DataBrew, and job bookmarks
- Day 3: Data formats (Parquet, ORC, Avro, JSON, CSV) and compression strategies
- Day 4: DMS full-load, CDC, schema conversion, and migration patterns
- Day 5: Kinesis Data Streams, Firehose, and Data Analytics comparison
- Day 6: MSK, Lambda for data processing, and streaming ingestion patterns
- Day 7: Data ingestion quiz and flashcard review
- Days 8-9: S3 data lake design: partitioning, lifecycle, Intelligent-Tiering, and event notifications
- Day 10: Lake Formation: fine-grained access, LF-Tags, cross-account sharing, and governed tables
- Day 11: Redshift architecture, distribution styles, sort keys, COPY, and UNLOAD
- Day 12: Redshift Spectrum, Serverless, materialized views, and WLM
- Day 13: DynamoDB, RDS/Aurora for analytics, and Athena federated queries
- Day 14: Data store management quiz and missed-answer review
- Days 15-16: Step Functions orchestration, state machines, Map state, error handling
- Day 17: MWAA (Airflow) DAGs, operators, scheduling, and Glue workflows
- Day 18: CloudWatch monitoring for Glue, EMR, Kinesis, and pipeline health
- Day 19: Glue Data Quality, data validation, and testing strategies
- Day 20: Athena optimization, Redshift WLM, QuickSight, and EMR troubleshooting
- Day 21: Data operations quiz and cheat sheet review
- Day 22: IAM roles for data services, service-linked roles, and cross-account access
- Day 23: KMS encryption (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C), key policies, and envelope encryption
- Day 24: Lake Formation permissions, data filters, and Macie for PII
- Day 25: CloudTrail auditing, AWS Config, and data governance patterns
- Day 26: Full mock exam #1
- Day 27: Review mock exam #1 and rebuild notes around weak topics
- Day 28: Full mock exam #2 and final weak-area flashcards
- Review all four DEA-C01 domains and weights
- Re-read cheat sheets for Glue, Kinesis, S3, Redshift, Athena, and Lake Formation
- Take one final mixed quiz if needed
- Rest and keep final notes short
Study Tips
Build a comparison chart: Glue vs EMR vs Lambda for data transformation.
Hands-on with Glue Studio, Athena, and Redshift Spectrum helps solidify concepts.
Know the Glue Data Catalog role — it serves Athena, EMR, and Redshift Spectrum.
Aim for consistent 80%+ on practice quizzes before scheduling the exam.
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with AWS Data Engineer Associate practice questions.