SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
The associate-level AWS architecture exam. It asks you to choose between AWS services under constraints — a budget, a recovery objective, a compliance requirement — and to justify the choice against the Well-Architected Framework. Design, not implementation.
Exam domains
What the exam covers and how much each part counts. Select a domain to practise just that area.
| Domain | Weight | Practice questions |
|---|---|---|
| Design Secure ArchitecturesSecure access to AWS resources, secure workloads and applications, and the right data security controls for a given requirement. | 30% | 11 |
| Design Resilient ArchitecturesScalable and loosely coupled architectures, and designs that meet a stated recovery time and recovery point objective. | 26% | 9 |
| Design High-Performing ArchitecturesHigh-performing storage, compute, database and networking solutions, and data ingestion and transformation that keeps up with the load. | 24% | 7 |
| Design Cost-Optimized ArchitecturesCost-optimised storage, compute, database and network solutions — the cheapest design that still meets the requirement, not the cheapest design. | 20% | 6 |
Topics you can drill
Each domain breaks down into topics you can practise on their own.
Design Secure Architectures
- IAM and access controlRoles, policies, federation, permission boundaries and cross-account access.
- Network securitySecurity groups, NACLs, VPC endpoints, WAF, Shield and private connectivity.
- Data protectionEncryption at rest and in transit, KMS key policies, secrets management and certificates.
- Governance and auditOrganizations, SCPs, CloudTrail, Config and multi-account guardrails.
Design Resilient Architectures
- High availabilityMulti-AZ and multi-Region designs, failover and health checking.
- Decoupling and messagingSQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions and the patterns that keep components independent.
- Backup and recoveryRTO and RPO, backup strategies, pilot light, warm standby and cross-Region replication.
- ScalingAuto Scaling groups, scaling policies and designing for elastic load.
Design High-Performing Architectures
- Storage performanceS3 classes and access patterns, EBS volume types, EFS, FSx and file versus object choice.
- Compute performanceInstance families, Lambda, containers and choosing compute for a workload shape.
- Database performanceRDS, Aurora, DynamoDB capacity and access patterns, read replicas and caching.
- Network and deliveryCloudFront, Global Accelerator, Direct Connect, placement groups and edge delivery.
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
- Compute costPurchase options, Spot, Savings Plans, right-sizing and serverless economics.
- Storage costLifecycle policies, storage classes, Intelligent-Tiering and retrieval charges.
- Data transfer costEgress charges, NAT gateway costs, VPC endpoints and cross-AZ traffic.
- Cost governanceBudgets, Cost Explorer, tagging strategy and chargeback across accounts.
Who sits this exam
Engineers with about a year of hands-on AWS experience who are asked to make architectural decisions and defend them.
AWS’s own page for this exam (opens in a new tab)How these questions are written
- Original, from AWS’s published guide for SAA-C03 — never recalled from a real exam.
- Mapped to a domain and topic, and reviewed before it is published.
- Every option explained, with a link to the documentation behind it.
Preparing for SAA-C03 with SupportExams
Practise, see where your evidence is thin, fix it, and reassess — until readiness across the 4 domains above says you are ready to book.
Practice available
- Quick practiceTen mixed questions across the exam. A short daily session, with the explanation after each one.
- Custom practiceChoose a domain, a topic, a difficulty and a length.
- Readiness assessmentBalanced across every domain of the blueprint, favouring questions you have not seen. Builds the evidence readiness needs.
- Weak areasProLeads with the concepts you keep missing, then weights toward the domains you are losing marks in.
- Review mistakesProSpaced review of every question you have missed. Each comes back after 0, 1, 3 and 7 days and clears only after four correct answers in a row.
- Exam simulationProFull length, timed, and proportioned to the published blueprint. Original practice questions, not real exam items.
How readiness works
Every answer is evidence for one of the SAA-C03 domains. Readiness weighs that evidence by the domain’s share of the exam, by difficulty and by how recent it is, and refuses to give a figure until there is enough of it. It moves you through five stages — Getting started, Building evidence, Making progress, Nearly ready, Ready — and names what is holding you back at each one.
How readiness is calculated →Free and Pro
Free: 20 practice questions a day; full explanations, including why each wrong option is wrong; quick practice, custom practice and readiness assessments; current readiness stage, blueprint coverage and next step.
Pro: unlimited practice questions; timed exam simulations, proportioned to the blueprint; weak-area practice and mistake review; your readiness journey over time — for every certification, one subscription.
Questions people ask
How many practice questions do you have for SAA-C03?
33 published questions, written against the current SAA-C03 exam guide and reviewed before publication. The bank grows one reviewed batch at a time.
Are these real exam questions?
No. Every question is original work written from the provider’s published exam guide and public documentation. Reproducing real exam questions would breach the provider’s NDA, is worthless for learning, and can cost a candidate their certification.
Which version of the SAA-C03 exam is this for?
Questions are written against Amazon Web Services’s published exam guide for SAA-C03, last checked against the source on 2026-09-11. When a provider revises an exam, the new version is tracked separately so existing practice is never silently relabelled.
Does a good score here mean I will pass?
A SupportExams practice score is not an official exam result and does not use the provider’s scoring model. It measures how you performed on the questions in this product. Readiness is not a probability of passing; it summarises how much of the blueprint you have evidenced and how well.
What can I do for free?
20 questions a day with full explanations, quick and custom practice, readiness assessments, and your current readiness stage with a recommended next step. No card is needed. Pro adds unlimited practice, timed exam simulations, weak-area practice, mistake review and your readiness journey over time, across every certification for one price.
What is the passing score for SAA-C03?
Amazon Web Services states the passing standard as 720 of a scaled 100–1,000. Our practice percentages are not on that scale and are not comparable to it.