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AWS AWS 100% Free Practice Simulator

AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01)

Design, build, operationalize, and maintain robust data pipelines, data ingestion architectures, Lakehouses, analytics stores, and security controls across AWS data services.

130 min
Time Allowance
52
Exam Questions
72%
Passing Score
~2.5 min
Target Pace / Q

Official Exam Specification & Quick Facts

Certification Track
AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01)
Exam Vendor / Provider
AWS
Domain Area
AWS
Testing Time
130 minutes (~2.5 min/q)
Passing Benchmark
72% scaled score
Simulator Access
100% Free · Unlimited Retakes

Question Difficulty Breakdown

Easy
17 q's (33%)
Medium
18 q's (35%)
Hard
17 q's (33%)
Difficulty distribution mirrors authentic proctored exam questions with scenario traps, multi-select items, and architectural trade-offs.

Recommended Study Guides & Exam Preparation Blueprints

Reinforce your knowledge with domain breakdowns, trap question analyses, and architectural cheat sheets:

Exam Guidelines & Simulation Rules

Timed Simulation The 130-minute timer starts immediately. Sessions auto-submit when the clock reaches zero.
Realistic Formats Single-choice and multi-choice scenario questions modeled directly from the official AWS syllabus.
Flag & Review Flag challenging questions to review anytime before submitting your final answers.
In-Depth Explanations Instant post-exam breakdown explaining why the correct choice wins and why distractor options fail.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The DEA-C01 exam contains 65 multiple-choice and multiple-response questions over 130 minutes. Cost is $150 USD with a passing threshold of 720/1000 (72%).

Domains include: (1) Data Ingestion and Transformation (~34%), (2) Data Store Management (~26%), (3) Data Operations and Support (~22%), and (4) Data Security and Governance (~18%).

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service. Glue Crawlers scan data in S3 or databases, infer schemas, and catalog metadata into the AWS Glue Data Catalog for Athena and Redshift queries.

AWS Glue is completely serverless and managed for Python/Spark ETL scripts. Amazon EMR provides full control over provisioned or serverless big data clusters running open-source tools (Spark, Hadoop, Presto, Flink).

Redshift Serverless automatically provisions and scales data warehouse capacity (measured in Redshift Processing Units or RPUs) based on query complexity without manual cluster management.

Athena is an interactive serverless query engine based on Trino/Presto that queries structured and semi-structured data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, charged by data scanned.

Kinesis Data Streams is a real-time streaming data service requiring shard management and custom consumers. Kinesis Data Firehose (Amazon Data Firehose) is a fully managed service that delivers streaming data directly to S3, Redshift, or OpenSearch with zero custom code.

Lake Formation simplifies data lake setup and enforces fine-grained, column-level, row-level, and cell-level access control permissions across Amazon S3 data queried via Athena, Glue, and Redshift.

They are open-source table formats that provide ACID transactions, time travel, schema evolution, and partition evolution over data lake files stored in Amazon S3.

Amazon MWAA is a managed Apache Airflow service that orchestrates end-to-end data pipelines written in Python DAGs, coordinating ingestion, transformation, and warehouse loads.

The DEA-C01 certification is valid for three years from the date earned.

DEA-C01 certifies Data Engineers, Big Data Developers, and Analytics Solutions Architects earning average US salaries between $135,000 and $175,000.