AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
The most widely held cloud certification there is. 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.
The exam
- Exam code
- SAA-C03
- Questions
- 65
- Scored questions
- 50
- Time
- 130 minutes
- Passing standard
- 720 of a scaled 100–1,000
- Domains
- 4
Exam domains
| Domain | Weight | 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
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 ↗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.
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.
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.