SAA-C03 exam guide: format, domains, preparation
Who the exam is for
SAA-C03 is the exam code for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification. It targets people who design solutions on AWS: choosing services, structuring networks and accounts, and balancing security, resilience, performance and cost. The official exam guide organises the whole scope around architecture design decisions rather than day-to-day operation of a single service.
The guide lists services that are in scope and services that are out of scope. The in-scope list is described by the guide itself as non-exhaustive and subject to change, so treat it as a map of what to study, not as a closed list.
Exam format
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Exam code | SAA-C03 |
| Duration | 130 minutes |
| Number of questions | 65 (50 scored, 15 unscored; the unscored questions are not identified) |
| Question types | Multiple choice (one correct response, three distractors) and multiple response (two or more correct responses out of five or more options) |
| Scoring | Scaled score from 100 to 1,000; compensatory model |
| Passing score | 720 |
| Delivery | Pearson VUE test centre or online proctored exam |
The compensatory model means you do not need to pass each domain separately: the overall score decides the result. The exam uses short service names (for example Amazon SNS), so it helps to recognise both the full and the short form.
Domains and weights
The official content outline has four domains. Each domain is split into task statements.
| Domain | Weight | Task statements |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Design Secure Architectures | 30 % | 1.1 Design secure access to AWS resources; 1.2 Design secure workloads and applications; 1.3 Determine appropriate data security controls |
| 2. Design Resilient Architectures | 26 % | 2.1 Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures; 2.2 Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures |
| 3. Design High-Performing Architectures | 24 % | 3.1 storage; 3.2 elastic compute; 3.3 database; 3.4 network; 3.5 data ingestion and transformation |
| 4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20 % | 4.1 storage; 4.2 compute; 4.3 database; 4.4 network |
A few themes from the task statements, to give an idea of the breadth:
- Security: multi-account setups and federation (IAM, IAM Identity Center), least privilege, the shared responsibility model, security groups and network ACLs, encryption at rest with KMS and in transit with ACM/TLS.
- Resilience: loose coupling with SQS, SNS and Step Functions, Availability Zones and Regions, Route 53, and the disaster recovery strategies backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active-active, with RPO and RTO.
- Performance: object, file and block storage (S3, EFS, EBS), Auto Scaling and Lambda, ElastiCache, Aurora and DynamoDB, CloudFront and Global Accelerator, data ingestion with Kinesis, Glue and Athena.
- Cost: Spot, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, S3 lifecycle and storage classes, Cost Explorer and Budgets, NAT gateway choices, VPC endpoints and data transfer between Availability Zones and Regions.
Services in movement
Several services or features named in the exam scope have been renamed, closed to new customers or marked as legacy in the product documentation. When you study, read the current page rather than an older summary.
- Amazon QuickSight has evolved into Amazon Quick; the exam guide uses the name Amazon Quick. Amazon Quick documentation
- The original vault-based Amazon Glacier service no longer accepts new customers; the S3 Glacier storage classes are recommended instead. Amazon Glacier documentation
- AWS Snowball Edge is no longer available to new customers; the page points to DataSync and Data Transfer Terminal. Snowball Edge documentation
- EFS Max I/O is a previous generation performance mode; General Purpose is recommended. EFS performance
- EC2 Auto Scaling launch configurations do not support new instance types released since 1 January 2023; launch templates are the replacement. Launch configurations
- CloudFront origin access identity (OAI) is labelled legacy; origin access control (OAC) is recommended. Restricting access to an S3 origin
- S3 ACLs are disabled by default (bucket owner enforced), and keeping them disabled is recommended. S3 Object Ownership
How to prepare
- Read the official certification page for current logistics and booking options.
- Work through the official exam guide, domain by domain. For each task statement, list the services it names and check you can explain when to choose one over another.
- Review the in-scope and out-of-scope service lists in the guide. Out-of-scope services can still appear as wrong options, so knowing what they do helps you rule them out.
- Spend time in proportion to the weights: security and resilience together account for more than half of the outline.
- For each service, read the current product documentation, paying attention to the services in movement listed above.
- AWS also offers exam preparation on AWS Skill Builder; it requires signing in.
- Practise under timed conditions with our SAA-C03 practice exam, then review weak areas question by question in the free study mode.
Our practice questions are single-answer multiple choice only; the exam also includes multiple response questions, so practise reading every option before deciding.
Practice Exam SAA-C03: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
25 free questions with explanations, no account needed.