AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate (SAA-C03)
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) — 5 domains covering resilient, high-performing, secure, cost-optimised, and operationally excellent architectures on AWS.
The SAA-C03 is the most widely held AWS certification. It validates the ability to design distributed systems on AWS across five architecture domains. It is an associate-level exam requiring roughly 1 year of hands-on AWS experience and is the natural next step after landscape/aws-cloud-practitioner.
Exam Format
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Questions | 65 total (50 scored + 15 unscored pilot) |
| Question types | Multiple choice, multiple response |
| Time | 130 minutes |
| Passing score | 720 out of 1,000 (scaled) |
| Cost | $150 USD |
| Recommended experience | 1+ year hands-on AWS experience across a variety of services |
Domain Weightings
| Domain | Title | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Design Resilient Architectures | 30% |
| 2 | Design High-Performing Architectures | 28% |
| 3 | Design Secure Architectures | 24% |
| 4 | Design Cost-Optimised Architectures | 18% |
Domains 1 and 2 together account for 58% of the exam. Resiliency and performance are the primary focus areas.
Domain 1: Design Resilient Architectures (30%)
Core themes: multi-AZ deployments, decoupled architectures, managed services over self-managed, automatic failover. Key services: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, RDS Multi-AZ, S3 (11-nines durability), SQS (decoupling), Route 53 failover routing, AWS Backup, Elastic Disaster Recovery.
Key patterns: active-active vs active-passive failover, event-driven decoupling with SQS/SNS, stateless application design to enable horizontal scaling, loose coupling to prevent cascading failures.
Domain 2: Design High-Performing Architectures (28%)
Core themes: choosing the right compute, storage, database, and network service for the workload characteristics. Key services: EC2 instance families (compute-optimised for CPU-bound, memory-optimised for large datasets), ElastiCache (sub-millisecond caching), CloudFront (CDN for static and dynamic content), DynamoDB (single-digit ms at any scale), Aurora (up to 5x faster than MySQL, 15 read replicas).
Key patterns: caching at multiple layers (CloudFront, ElastiCache, DAX for DynamoDB), read replicas for read-heavy workloads, SQS-based fan-out for workload parallelism, S3 multipart upload for large objects.
Domain 3: Design Secure Architectures (24%)
Core themes: least privilege IAM, network isolation with VPC, encryption at rest and in transit, secrets management, threat detection. Key services: IAM roles and policies, VPC private subnets, security groups, NACLs, AWS KMS, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Certificate Manager, GuardDuty, Shield, WAF.
Key patterns: never use root account for operations, grant roles not users for EC2 and Lambda, VPC endpoints to keep traffic off public internet, private subnets for databases and internal services.
Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimised Architectures (18%)
Core themes: choose the right pricing model for the workload, avoid waste, use managed services to reduce operational overhead. Key services: EC2 Spot Instances (up to 90% savings for fault-tolerant workloads), Reserved Instances/Savings Plans (steady-state workloads), S3 Intelligent-Tiering, Compute Optimizer, Cost Explorer.
Key patterns: Spot for batch and CI workloads, Reserved/Savings Plan for predictable production workloads, S3 lifecycle policies to move data to cheaper tiers, rightsizing before committing to Reserved Instances.
Connections
- landscape/aws-cloud-practitioner — foundational AWS certification; the prerequisite conceptual layer
- cloud/aws-bedrock-agentcore — Bedrock and AI-specific AWS architecture patterns
- infra/vector-stores — database selection for AI workloads covered under Domain 2
Open Questions
- Which domain rewards studying AWS whitepapers most — Domain 1 (resiliency) or Domain 3 (security)?
- What's the realistic minimum practice question count to reliably pass for a candidate with 2+ years hands-on AWS?
- Has SAA-C03 shifted toward serverless and container questions as EC2-centric architectures decline in practice?
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