AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03): How to Prepare

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate is one of the most requested cloud certifications. It shows you can design secure, reliable and cost-effective systems on Amazon Web Services.

Exam at a glance

Exam domains

1. Design Secure Architectures (30%)
2. Design Resilient Architectures (26%)
3. Design High-Performing Architectures (24%)
4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%)

Services you must know well

• Compute: EC2, Auto Scaling, Lambda
• Storage: S3 storage classes, EBS, EFS
• Databases: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB
• Networking: VPC, subnets, route tables, security groups, Route 53, CloudFront
• Security: IAM policies and roles, KMS

How to prepare

1. Create an AWS Free Tier account and build small projects yourself.
2. Learn the Well-Architected Framework. Many questions are based on it.
3. Practice scenario questions. Look for the answer that meets all the requirements: cost, availability and security.

Next steps after the Associate level: Solutions Architect – Professional, or a specialty such as DevOps or databases.