Certification guide
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) validates that you can design solutions on AWS that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized – the four pillars that mirror the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It sits one step above the foundational AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and is the most widely held AWS certification worldwide, a common gate for cloud engineer, cloud architect, and DevOps roles.
The target candidate is expected to have at least a year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions using AWS compute, storage, database, and networking services. You are not expected to be a specialist in any one service – you are expected to know which service is the right tool for a scenario, and why the near-miss alternatives are not. Most questions are scenario-driven and multi-service, with a stated business or technical requirement that eliminates three plausible options.
The four domains
The exam is organized into four content domains. The percentages below are the official domain weightings from the current SAA-C03 exam guide – they are how AWS distributes the scored questions.
Design Secure Architectures
Domain 1 · 30%The largest domain and the single biggest reason candidates fail. Covers IAM (roles, policies, permission boundaries, IAM Identity Center, cross-account patterns), data protection with KMS and Secrets Manager, VPC network security (security groups, network ACLs, VPC endpoints), and edge and detection services such as AWS WAF, Shield, GuardDuty, Macie, and CloudTrail. Expect scenario questions where the wrong answer is a real service that almost fits but breaks a stated requirement.
Design Resilient Architectures
Domain 2 · 26%Multi-AZ and multi-Region availability, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing patterns, RDS Multi-AZ vs read replicas, Aurora Global Database, DynamoDB Global Tables, SQS and SNS for decoupling, Route 53 failover and health checks, and the four canonical disaster-recovery strategies (backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active) with their RTO and RPO trade-offs. Many questions turn on the difference between similar-looking services or between synchronous and asynchronous replication.
Design High-Performing Architectures
Domain 3 · 24%Choosing the right storage class (S3 tiers, EBS volume types, EFS, FSx), scaling compute (Lambda, Fargate, ECS, EKS, EC2 Auto Scaling, provisioned concurrency), database performance (ElastiCache, DynamoDB DAX, read replicas), and networking performance (CloudFront, Global Accelerator, placement groups, NLB vs ALB). Also covers data ingestion at scale with Kinesis, MSK, DataSync, and Storage Gateway. Trade-offs between latency, throughput, and cost are the recurring theme.
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Domain 4 · 20%The smallest domain but the one where practitioner intuition matters most. Covers EC2 purchasing options (On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot, Dedicated Hosts) and when each is right, S3 storage classes and lifecycle policies, right-sizing with Compute Optimizer, cost visibility with AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer, and the recurring VPC-cost trap of NAT gateway data transfer that Gateway VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB can eliminate.
How our practice exams work
Each set contains 65 fresh scenario-based questions, distributed exactly to the current SAA-C03 blueprint – 20 questions on secure architecture, 17 on resilience, 15 on high performance, and 13 on cost optimization. Sets are authored around a rotating enterprise vertical (general enterprise, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, government, retail, SaaS, higher education, energy, and a mixed-vertical randomized simulator) so that practicing multiple sets exposes you to the widest possible spread of real-world scenarios rather than the same handful reworded.
Every question is written to a working-architect quality floor: three of the four options are plausible near-misses that a working practitioner would seriously consider, and the explanation names the tempting wrong answer and explains why the best answer beats it. That is how AWS themselves write the real thing, and it is the only style of practice that predicts real-exam performance.
AWS scores the live exam on a 100-to-1000 scale with a 720 cut; we set the pass mark on each set at 72% as the honest raw-score equivalent, so a passing run here means genuine coverage across all four domains – not luck in the heavy ones.
AWS Solutions Architect Associate - Practice Exam
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) practice exam series. Sixty-five scenario-based questions across a general-enterprise audience, matched to the current AWS exam blueprint: Design Secure…
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All questions, answers, and explanations on Certifym are original content created for practice purposes. They are not actual AWS examination questions and are not represented as such. Practicing with these materials does not guarantee a passing result on any live certification exam.