About The Exam

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam validates your ability to design secure, reliable, and cost-optimized architectures on AWS. It’s designed for individuals with about one year of hands-on AWS experience and a solid grasp of core services like EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and VPC.

The current version, SAA-C03, covers four key domains:

1. Design Secure Architectures (30%)

2. Design Resilient Architectures (26%)

3. Design High-Performing Architectures (24%)

4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%)

The exam format includes 65 questions (multiple choice and multiple response), to be completed in 130 minutes. It’s available in several languages and costs $150 USD. A passing score is typically 720 out of 1000.

Expect scenario-based questions that test your ability to choose the best AWS solution based on requirements such as scalability, fault tolerance, performance, and budget.

Preparation often includes AWS whitepapers, hands-on labs, and practice exams. Once certified, you’ll have a globally recognized credential proving you can design well-architected systems in the AWS cloud — and it’s a strong stepping stone toward the Professional-level Architect certification.

Exam Materials and Resources

As with most AWS exams there is an abundance of material you can get your hands on. Some paid (expensive and cheap), some free. The usual suspects, Cantril.io, TutorialsDojo and Neal Davis all offer the standard one-off payment for their self-paced materials which will greatly help. These courses often come with way more theory than is needed and a lot of labs which downloaded with help with GitHub.

My Experience