What Is the AWS Developer Associate (DVA-C02)? Glossary & Key Terms

DVA-C02
The exam code for the current version of the AWS Certified Developer - Associate certification.
Cold Start
The added latency incurred when a serverless function like AWS Lambda must initialize a brand-new execution environment before it can process an invocation.
Provisioned Concurrency
A Lambda feature that keeps a specified number of execution environments pre-initialized and ready to respond with minimal latency, avoiding cold starts.
Reserved Concurrency
A per-function setting in Lambda that caps the maximum number of concurrent executions and reserves that capacity from the account's shared concurrency pool.
DLQ (Dead-Letter Queue)
A secondary queue or target that receives messages or events which repeatedly fail processing, isolating them from the main processing flow for later inspection.
Idempotency
A property of an operation where performing it multiple times produces the same effect as performing it once, important for safely retrying API requests or message processing.
IAM Role
An AWS identity with associated permission policies that can be assumed by users, applications, or services to obtain temporary security credentials, rather than long-term access keys.
STS (Security Token Service)
An AWS service that issues temporary, limited-privilege security credentials for IAM users or federated identities, commonly via the AssumeRole API.
KMS (Key Management Service)
A managed AWS service for creating and controlling cryptographic keys used to encrypt data across AWS services and applications.
Envelope Encryption
A pattern where data is encrypted with a data key, and that data key is itself encrypted by a master key (such as a KMS key), reducing the amount of data sent directly to the key management service.
Pre-Signed URL
A URL generated for an S3 object that embeds temporary authentication information, granting time-limited access to upload or download the object without AWS credentials.
Multipart Upload
An S3 upload method that splits a large object into independently uploaded parts, improving throughput and enabling resumable uploads.
GSI (Global Secondary Index)
A DynamoDB index with a partition key and optional sort key different from the base table, enabling additional query access patterns with eventually consistent reads.
LSI (Local Secondary Index)
A DynamoDB index that shares the base table's partition key but uses an alternate sort key, supporting strongly consistent reads and created only at table creation time.
DynamoDB Streams
A feature that captures a time-ordered sequence of item-level modifications in a DynamoDB table, which can be consumed by Lambda or other applications to trigger downstream processing.
Blue/Green Deployment
A deployment strategy that runs a new application version (green) alongside the existing version (blue) and shifts traffic over, enabling fast rollback by redirecting traffic back to blue.
Canary Deployment
A deployment strategy that shifts a small percentage of traffic to a new version first, monitors for errors, and gradually increases traffic if the new version proves healthy.
AppSpec File
A YAML or JSON file used by AWS CodeDeploy that specifies deployment source locations, target configuration, and lifecycle event hooks for EC2/on-premises or Lambda deployments.
X-Ray
An AWS service that traces requests across distributed application components, producing service maps and latency data to help debug performance issues and errors.
CloudWatch Alarm
A CloudWatch resource that watches a single metric or expression and triggers actions (such as notifications or auto scaling) when the value breaches a defined threshold.
Parameter Store
An AWS Systems Manager capability for storing and retrieving configuration data and secrets as named parameters, with optional KMS encryption.
Secrets Manager
An AWS service purpose-built for storing, retrieving, and automatically rotating sensitive credentials such as database passwords and API keys.
SAM (Serverless Application Model)
An open-source framework and CloudFormation extension that simplifies defining serverless resources like Lambda functions, APIs, and DynamoDB tables using a shorthand template syntax.
Lambda Layer
A packaged archive of shared libraries, custom runtimes, or dependencies that can be attached to one or more Lambda functions without bundling that code into each deployment package.