AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) Study Guide

Step 1: Learn the exam facts

SAA-C03 has 65 questions, 50 scored and 15 unscored, in 130 minutes. Questions are multiple choice or multiple response, and you need a scaled score of 720 out of 1000. The fee is 150 USD. It is valid for three years, and you recertify by passing the latest exam or by earning the Solutions Architect Professional certification. AWS recommends at least one year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS.

Step 2: Study the four domains

The weights show that security and resilience carry the most points. Every question is a scenario that asks for the best design, so learn why a choice is right, not just what a service does.

Domain                              Weight
Design Secure Architectures         30%
Design Resilient Architectures      26%
Design High-Performing Architectures 24%
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20%

Step 3: Master security design

Know IAM policies, roles, and permission boundaries, how to secure data at rest and in transit with KMS and TLS, and how to restrict network access with security groups, network ACLs, and VPC endpoints. Understand Organizations and service control policies, and how to protect applications with services such as WAF and Shield. A recurring pattern is least privilege and avoiding long-lived credentials.

Step 4: Master resilience and performance

Learn multi-AZ designs, load balancing with ALB and NLB, Auto Scaling, decoupling with SQS and SNS, and database resilience with RDS Multi-AZ, read replicas, and Aurora. Know disaster recovery strategies and their trade-offs: backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site. For performance, understand caching with CloudFront and ElastiCache, choosing storage classes and volume types, and picking the right database for the access pattern.

Step 5: Master cost optimization

Know purchasing options, S3 storage classes and lifecycle policies, right-sizing, serverless trade-offs, data transfer costs, and tools such as Cost Explorer and Budgets. Questions often ask for the most cost-effective solution that still meets a stated requirement, so read constraints carefully.

Step 6: Follow an 8-week plan

Weeks 1 to 2: networking, IAM, and storage. Weeks 3 to 4: compute, databases, and decoupling. Weeks 5 to 6: security, resilience, and migration topics. Week 7: cost and performance review with AWS's official practice question set. Week 8: AWS's official practice exam and your weak areas. Build things as you go: a three-tier VPC with public and private subnets, an Auto Scaling web tier behind a load balancer, and a serverless API. Delete resources after each lab.