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SAA-C03 · Free study guide

AWS Certified Solutions Architect · Associate

An associate exam built on scenarios: you pick the architecture that best meets security, resilience, performance and cost requirements.

Questions
65 (50 scored)
Time
130 minutes
Passing score
720 / 1000
Level
Associate

What the exam covers

Domains and key topics

Domain 130% of the exam

Design Secure Architectures

  • IAM users, roles, policies and least privilege
  • AWS Organizations and service control policies (SCPs)
  • VPC security: security groups vs. network ACLs
  • Encryption at rest and in transit: KMS, ACM
  • Secrets Manager vs. Parameter Store
  • Edge protection: WAF, Shield, CloudFront
Official domain details ↗
Domain 226% of the exam

Design Resilient Architectures

  • Multi-AZ vs. multi-Region designs
  • Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling
  • Decoupling with SQS, SNS and EventBridge
  • Backup and disaster recovery: RTO and RPO strategies
  • Route 53 routing and health checks
Official domain details ↗
Domain 324% of the exam

Design High-Performing Architectures

  • Choosing storage: S3, EBS, EFS, FSx
  • Choosing databases: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB
  • Caching: ElastiCache, DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), CloudFront
  • Compute choices: EC2, Lambda, ECS, Fargate
  • Streaming and analytics: Kinesis, Athena, Glue
Official domain details ↗
Domain 420% of the exam

Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

  • EC2 pricing: On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved, Spot
  • S3 storage classes and lifecycle rules
  • Right-sizing and Auto Scaling
  • Data transfer costs and NAT gateway trade-offs
  • Cost visibility: Cost Explorer, Budgets, tagging
Official domain details ↗

Know these well

Key AWS services

IAM & Organizations

Identity, roles, policies and account guardrails.

Amazon VPC

Subnets, route tables, NAT, endpoints, peering, Transit Gateway.

Amazon EC2 & Auto Scaling

Compute and elastic capacity.

Elastic Load Balancing

Application, Network and Gateway Load Balancers.

Amazon S3

Object storage, storage classes, replication, lifecycle.

Amazon EBS / EFS / FSx

Block, shared file and specialized file storage.

Amazon RDS & Aurora

Managed relational databases, read replicas, Multi-AZ.

Amazon DynamoDB

Serverless key-value database, global tables.

AWS Lambda, ECS & Fargate

Serverless and container compute.

SQS, SNS & EventBridge

Messaging and event-driven decoupling.

Route 53 & CloudFront

DNS routing and content delivery.

KMS, Secrets Manager & WAF

Encryption, secrets and web protection.

How to prepare

A simple study plan

  1. 1Read the official exam guide and note the four domains.
  2. 2Learn the core services until you can name the right one for a requirement.
  3. 3Practice reading for key words: "most cost-effective", "least operational overhead", "highly available".
  4. 4Spend the most time on domain 1 (30%): security appears in most questions.
  5. 5Take a timed practice exam and review every explanation, right and wrong.

Always check the official SAA-C03 exam guide ↗ for the current version of the exam.

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