AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) Study Guide

Preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam? This is the complete study guide — six chapters covering all four domains of AWS's official exam guide, written in plain language for working engineers who want the design trade-offs to make sense, not just to memorize service names.

The real exam: 65 questions in 130 minutes — multiple choice and multiple response — with a passing score of 720 on AWS's scaled score of 100–1,000. The exam fee is US$150, taken at a Pearson VUE test center or online proctored. The certification is valid for 3 years. AWS sets no mandatory prerequisite; its exam guide recommends at least a year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS.

What's inside:

• Chapter 1 — The Exam and Secure Access: the exam itself, how it is scored, and how this package is organized; the root user; IAM users, groups, and roles; policies and how policy evaluation really works; least privilege; MFA and credential hygiene; Access Analyzer and credential reports; IAM Identity Center; federation; Organizations and SCPs; cross-account access and STS; permission boundaries; resource-based policies

• Chapter 2 — Securing Workloads and Data: VPC security design; security groups vs. network ACLs; VPC endpoints and PrivateLink; WAF, Shield, and Network Firewall; GuardDuty, Inspector, and Security Hub; encryption in transit and certificates; envelope encryption; KMS in depth (keys, policies, grants, rotation); CloudHSM; S3 security; Secrets Manager vs. Parameter Store; EBS and RDS encryption behavior

• Chapter 3 — Designing Resilient Architectures: availability and durability; Regions and Availability Zones; load balancers and health checks; Auto Scaling; RDS Multi-AZ vs. read replicas; Aurora high availability and failover; Route 53 routing policies; loose coupling with SQS, SNS, EventBridge, and Step Functions; stateless design; backup and recovery — RTO, RPO, and the four DR strategies

• Chapter 4 — High-Performing Storage, Compute, and Databases: high-performing S3 design; EBS volume types; EFS performance and throughput modes; the FSx family; EC2 instance families and selection; Lambda performance; ECS and Fargate at awareness level; database selection and performance; caching, tiering, and right-sizing

Chapter 5 — High-Performing Networks and Data Pipelines: VPC architecture for performance; CloudFront; Global Accelerator vs. CloudFront — the classic distinction; load balancer selection; Direct Connect vs. Site-to-Site VPN; Transit Gateway and VPC peering; data ingestion and transformation pipelines

Chapter 6 — Cost-Optimized Architectures and Exam Day: cost-optimized storage, compute, databases, and networking; cost visibility and governance (Cost Explorer, Budgets, cost allocation tags, Trusted Advisor); and exam day itself — booking, the testing rules, and what to do after you pass

Every chapter includes "How this shows up on the test" callouts that show the form a topic takes in an exam question, plus a chapter summary for final review.

Files included (1):

aws-saa-study-guide.pdf — the complete 6-chapter guide (83 pages)

Want practice questions too? The Deluxe tier adds the full 500-question practice bank and the cheat sheets, plus license-key access to the online practice hub.

Independent study material. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services (AWS).