About This Study Plan

This 90-day study plan breaks the DEA-C01 (AWS Data Engineer Associate) exam preparation into 3 focused study sessions with a total of 15 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 comprehensive 90-day plan for building deep AWS data engineering knowledge before the DEA-C01 exam.

3Study Sessions

15Total Tasks

4Domains Covered

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 Ingestion

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: Data ingestion 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