SAA-C03 Overview — Format, Domains & Who Should Take It

Exam at a glance

• Exam name: AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate (SAA-C03)
• Questions: 65 total (multiple-choice and multiple-response)
• Time: 130 minutes
• Delivery: Testing center or online proctoring
• Result: Scaled score (pass/fail provided on completion)
• Language availability: Multiple languages (English plus others)

Tip: Budget ~2 minutes per question. Mark tough items and return on your review pass.

What the exam emphasizes (high level)

Expect scenario-driven items covering design decisions across core AWS services. The big themes:

• Resiliency & high availability: multi-AZ patterns, load balancing, auto scaling
• Security & access control: IAM policies/roles, KMS, VPC security controls, least privilege
• Networking & connectivity: VPC design, subnets, routing, NAT, PrivateLink, hybrid connectivity
• Storage & data: S3 classes/lifecycle, EBS/EFS trade-offs, RDS/Aurora choices, backups and DR
• Performance & cost optimization: right-sizing, caching, architectural trade-offs, pricing levers
• Operations & reliability: monitoring/alerts, logging, automation, infrastructure as code patterns

Who should take SAA-C03

• Cloud/solutions architects designing on AWS
• Developers and SysOps/DevOps engineers moving into architecture roles
• Professionals with hands-on exposure to AWS core services who want a validated associate-level credential

Recommended background: Practical experience with VPC, EC2, ELB/ALB, ASG, S3, RDS/Aurora, IAM, CloudWatch/CloudTrail, and KMS.

Question styles you’ll see

• Scenario MCQ/MR: Pick the best or two best options given constraints (security, performance, cost).
• Trade-off reasoning: Several answers might work; choose the one that best satisfies stated requirements.
• Gotchas: Subtle defaults (e.g., AZ scoping, cross-AZ charges, S3 Block Public Access, IAM vs resource policies).

Read the last sentence first to catch the core requirement (e.g., “most cost-effective,” “lowest operational overhead,” “highest availability”).

Study plan (4-step, efficient)

1. Scan the blueprint: Understand domain coverage and common service pairings.
2. Work the Syllabus (domain by domain): Learn objectives, then immediately drill targeted questions.
3. Capture patterns: Summarize misses into your own notes and keep the Cheatsheet handy.
4. Mock exams: Do 2–3 full-length timed mocks; review every miss and re-run weak domains.

Common architecture patterns to master

• Web tier HA: ALB + EC2 Auto Scaling across multiple AZs; stateless app tier; session stickiness only when justified
• Private workloads: Private subnets, NAT Gateway per AZ for resilience,