Amazon Web Services
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam objectives
Amazon Web Services publishes 4 exam domains with official weightings. The weight tells you where your marks come from — study time should roughly follow it.
SAA-C03AssociateIntermediate
1. Design Secure Architectures
30%- IAM roles, policies and least privilege — including cross-account access and when a role beats a key
- Network segmentation: VPCs, subnets, security groups vs NACLs, and where each control belongs
- Encryption at rest and in transit, KMS key policies, and secret handling with Secrets Manager vs Parameter Store
- Edge and perimeter protection — WAF, Shield, CloudFront — and which threat each actually addresses
2. Design Resilient Architectures
26%- Multi-AZ versus multi-Region: what each protects against and what each costs
- Decoupling with SQS, SNS and EventBridge so failures stay contained
- Storage durability and lifecycle — S3 classes, versioning, replication
- RTO and RPO reasoning: backup, pilot light, warm standby, active-active
3. Design High-Performing Architectures
24%- Choosing compute — EC2, Lambda, ECS, Fargate — against workload shape rather than preference
- Caching layers: CloudFront, ElastiCache, DAX, and where each belongs in a request path
- Picking the right data store: relational, DynamoDB, Aurora, purpose-built engines
- Scaling patterns — Auto Scaling, load balancer types, read replicas
4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
20%- EC2 purchasing models and matching commitment to workload predictability
- S3 storage-class selection and lifecycle transitions as a cost lever
- Data transfer costs — the charge candidates most often forget exists
- Right-sizing, and serverless as a cost strategy for spiky traffic
Our practice exam distributes its questions across these exact domains at these weightings — so your score per domain tells you precisely where you stand.
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