Prerequisites
- Hands-on familiarity with AWS data services (S3, Glue, Kinesis, Redshift)
- 3-5 hours of focused study time per day
- Willingness to review wrong answers immediately
Study Schedule
Day 1Domain 1: Batch Ingestion and Transformation
- Review AWS Glue: crawlers, Data Catalog, ETL jobs, DynamicFrames, and job bookmarks
- Study DMS: full-load, CDC, schema conversion, and replication instances
- Review data format conversion (CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC) and compression
- Take a Domain 1 quiz and note missed ETL patterns
Day 2Domain 1: Streaming Ingestion
- Compare Kinesis Data Streams vs Firehose vs Data Analytics
- Study MSK brokers, topics, partitions, and MSK Connect
- Review Lambda triggers for S3 events and Kinesis streams
- Run Glue and Kinesis flashcards
Day 3Domain 2: Data Store Management
- Review S3 data lake design: partitioning, formats, lifecycle, and Intelligent-Tiering
- Study Redshift: distribution styles, sort keys, COPY, UNLOAD, Spectrum, and Serverless
- Compare Athena vs Redshift vs Redshift Spectrum use cases
- Review Lake Formation: fine-grained access, LF-Tags, and governed tables
Day 4Domain 2 + Domain 3: Data Stores and Operations
- Review DynamoDB streams, export to S3, and global tables
- Study RDS/Aurora read replicas, Multi-AZ, and data extraction patterns
- Review pipeline orchestration: Step Functions vs MWAA vs Glue workflows
- Take a Domain 2 quiz
Day 5Domain 3: Operations, Monitoring, and Quality
- Study CloudWatch monitoring for Glue jobs, EMR clusters, and Kinesis streams
- Review Glue Data Quality rules and validation strategies
- Study Athena workgroups, Redshift WLM, and query optimization
- Review QuickSight: SPICE, dashboards, and row-level security
Day 6Domain 4: Security and Governance
- Review IAM roles for data services, least privilege, and cross-account access
- Study KMS encryption: SSE-S3 vs SSE-KMS, key policies, and encryption contexts
- Review Lake Formation permissions vs S3 bucket policies
- Study CloudTrail for data governance and Macie for PII detection
Day 7Final Review and Mock Exam
- Take a full 65-question timed mock exam
- Review every missed question and identify weak domains
- Re-read Glue, Kinesis, S3, Redshift, and Lake Formation cheat sheets
- Run all flashcard decks for final active recall
Study Tips
Domain 1 is 34% of the exam — spend extra time on Glue and Kinesis.
Know when to use each Kinesis service: Streams for real-time, Firehose for delivery, Analytics for SQL.
Practice differentiating data lake (S3 + Athena) vs warehouse (Redshift) vs lakehouse (Spectrum) scenarios.
Understand Lake Formation vs IAM policies for data access control.
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with DEA-C01 practice questions.