AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)
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Study guides
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How AWS Certification Exams Work: Scoring and RenewalHow AWS certification exams work: levels, booking, question types, unscored questions, scaled scores, pass marks, validity and how recertification works.
How Netflix Uses AWS: Control Plane, CDN and ChaosHow Netflix uses AWS: the 2008 outage behind the move, control plane vs Open Connect, chaos engineering, multi-Region design and what it teaches for exams.
What Is Amazon RDS? Multi-AZ, Read Replicas and BackupsWhat is Amazon RDS? Engines, Multi-AZ, read replicas, backups, RDS Proxy, Aurora and pricing explained, with the traps that AWS exams set around each one.
What Is AWS Lambda? Triggers, Concurrency and Cold StartsWhat is AWS Lambda? How functions run, cold starts, triggers vs event source mappings, concurrency, layers, aliases, pricing and the exam traps.
What jobs can you get with AWS Cloud Practitioner?What jobs can you get with AWS Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)? The roles it helps with, the ones it won't land on its own, and what to add next.
AWS CloudOps Engineer Associate (SOA-C03) exam guideAWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) replaced SysOps Administrator. Format, cost, the five domains, what changed and how to prepare.
Which AWS certification should you get? 2026 roadmapWhich AWS certification to get first, by role and experience, with each exam's status in October 2026, what is changing, and prices in USD and INR.
What Is AWS Glue? Data Catalog, Crawlers and ETL JobsWhat is AWS Glue? The Data Catalog, crawlers, ETL jobs and DPUs, workflows, streaming, job bookmarks, Flex and Data Quality, plus the traps AWS exams set.
AWS Edge Locations and CloudFront, ExplainedHow AWS edge locations work: CloudFront POPs, regional edge caches, the request path, edge location vs Region, and the Global Accelerator exam trap.
What Is Amazon EC2? Instances, AMIs, EBS and Auto ScalingAmazon EC2 explained: instances, AMIs, instance types, security groups, EBS, Auto Scaling groups and pricing options, with the traps AWS exams set.
Amazon S3 storage classes and lifecycle rulesHow S3 storage classes, Intelligent-Tiering and lifecycle rules work, with the retrieval fees and minimum durations that AWS exam questions turn on.
AWS disaster recovery strategies, RTO and RPOBackup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active/active on AWS, how RTO and RPO pick between them, and the services each strategy uses.
IAM users, roles and policies on AWSHow IAM users, roles, identity-based and resource-based policies, cross-account access, SCPs and permissions boundaries fit together for AWS exams.
SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge on AWSWhen to use an SQS queue, an SNS topic or an EventBridge bus, plus fan-out, FIFO ordering, visibility timeouts and dead-letter queues for AWS exams.
The AWS shared responsibility model explainedWhat AWS secures and what you secure on EC2, RDS, Lambda and S3, how the line moves with each service, and how Cloud Practitioner questions test it.
VPC endpoints vs NAT gateways on AWSWhen to use gateway endpoints, interface endpoints (PrivateLink) or a NAT gateway for private subnets, and the cost and security trade-offs exams test.
About the SAA-C03 exam
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate is the exam most people take after (or instead of) Cloud Practitioner. It checks whether you can pick the right AWS services for a workload and put them together so the result is secure, keeps running when something fails, performs well and doesn't cost more than it needs to. AWS recommends at least a year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions on AWS before you sit it.
Almost every question is a short scenario: a company has a requirement and a constraint, and you choose the design that meets both. The wrong options are usually designs that would work but break the constraint: too much operational overhead, too expensive, not highly available, or less secure than the alternative.
Exam format
- Questions: 65, multiple choice (one answer from four) or multiple response (two or more answers from five or more). 15 of the 65 are unscored trial questions, and you can't tell which ones.
- Time: 130 minutes.
- Passing score: 720 on a scaled score from 100 to 1,000. AWS doesn't publish the raw number of correct answers needed.
- Cost: 150 USD, at a Pearson VUE test center or online with a remote proctor.
- Validity: 3 years.
What the exam covers
The official exam guide splits the exam into four domains:
- Design Secure Architectures (30%). IAM users, roles and policies, cross-account access and AWS Organizations SCPs; network security with security groups, NACLs, VPC endpoints and AWS WAF; encryption with KMS, and Secrets Manager for credentials.
- Design Resilient Architectures (26%). Decoupling with SQS, SNS and EventBridge; Multi-AZ databases, Auto Scaling groups behind load balancers, and disaster recovery strategies from backup-and-restore up to multi-Region active-active with Route 53 failover.
- Design High-Performing Architectures (24%). Choosing storage (S3, EBS, EFS, FSx), compute, databases and caching (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB and DAX, ElastiCache), CloudFront and Global Accelerator, and data ingestion and analytics services.
- Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%). S3 storage classes and lifecycle rules, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and Spot, right-sizing databases, and avoiding needless data transfer charges such as NAT gateway traffic that a VPC endpoint could carry.
How the practice questions here are organised
Each 10-question practice test mixes all four domains in roughly the exam's proportions, so any single test is a fair sample of the real thing rather than a chapter quiz. Security and networking questions come up most often, followed by decoupling, disaster recovery and storage cost. Every question explains why the right answer is right and why each wrong option is wrong, with a link to the AWS documentation it is based on.
The full practice exam copies the real one: 65 questions in 130 minutes, weighted by domain the same way, with answers hidden until you submit. It scores all 65 questions and passes you at 72%, because AWS doesn't publish how its scaled score maps to correct answers.
A study plan that works
- Take Test 1 cold to see where you stand. Don't study first.
- Read the explanation of every question you got wrong, and of every one you guessed. The explanations of the wrong options teach as much as the right one.
- Work through the remaining tests, a few a day. Go back to a test you scored under 70% on after a few days, not straight away.
- When most tests pass comfortably, sit the full practice exam in one go, timed. Treat a score in the high 70s or above as a sign you're ready to book.
- Learn the patterns, not the answers: "least operational overhead" usually means a managed or serverless service, and "most cost-effective" usually means the cheapest option that still meets every stated requirement.
These questions are original, written from the public AWS documentation and the official exam guide. They are not real exam questions, and this site is not affiliated with AWS.