Prerequisites
- Basic cloud concepts and beginner AWS experience
- 30-60 minutes of study time per day
- AWS account access for optional hands-on labs
Study Schedule
Month 1 (Days 1-30)Data Foundations and Domain 1
- Week 1: AWS data services overview — S3, Glue, Kinesis, Redshift, Athena, EMR, DynamoDB
- Week 2: AWS Glue deep dive — crawlers, Data Catalog, ETL jobs, DataBrew, job bookmarks, DynamicFrames
- Week 3: Streaming ingestion — Kinesis Data Streams, Firehose, Data Analytics, MSK, Lambda triggers
- Week 4: DMS, data formats (Parquet, ORC, Avro), compression, and batch pipeline patterns
- End of month: Domain 1 quiz and Glue + Kinesis flashcards
Month 2 (Days 31-60)Data Stores, Operations, and Pipelines
- Week 5: S3 data lake design — partitioning, lifecycle, Intelligent-Tiering, event notifications
- Week 6: Redshift — architecture, distribution, sort keys, COPY, Spectrum, Serverless, WLM
- Week 7: Lake Formation — fine-grained access, LF-Tags, governed tables, cross-account sharing
- Week 8: Pipeline orchestration — Step Functions, MWAA, Glue workflows, CloudWatch monitoring
- End of month: Domains 2-3 mixed quiz and notes review
Month 3 (Days 61-90)Security, Governance, and Exam Readiness
- Week 9: IAM for data services, KMS encryption, Lake Formation permissions
- Week 10: CloudTrail, Macie, data governance, Athena optimization, QuickSight
- Week 11: Full mock exam #1 and detailed review of every wrong answer
- Week 12: Full mock exam #2, flashcards, cheat sheets, and weak-domain review
- Final days: One light mixed quiz and rest before exam day
Study Tips
Build a hands-on data pipeline with Glue, S3, and Athena to internalize the ETL workflow.
Create a comparison table: when to use Glue vs EMR vs Lambda vs Kinesis.
Turn wrong answers into study flashcards for spaced repetition.
Domain 1 (34%) and Domain 2 (26%) make up 60% of the exam — prioritize them.
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with DEA-C01 practice questions.