AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) — Exam Objectives & Practice Test
The complete SAA-C03 exam objectives — all four domains and their weightings — plus single-best-answer practice questions and flashcards to study them.
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What is AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03)?
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate validates the ability to design distributed systems on AWS that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized. The current exam is SAA-C03, which replaced the retired SAA-C02.
It is one of AWS's most widely held associate-level certifications, aimed at anyone in a solutions architect, cloud engineer, or cloud developer role who designs or reviews AWS architectures — not just people with "architect" in their title.
SAA-C03 exam overview
| Exam code | SAA-C03 |
|---|---|
| Questions | 65 (50 scored + 15 unscored, unidentified) — multiple choice + multiple response |
| Time | 130 minutes |
| Passing score | 720 (scale 100–1,000) |
| Recommended experience | ~1 year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions on AWS (recommended, not required) |
| Exam cost | $150 USD paid to AWS — see official AWS pricing (separate from CertStudio's prep price) |
Exam facts sourced from AWS's official exam guide at docs.aws.amazon.com — verified Sep 2026.
AWS SAA-C03 exam objectives (all 4 domains)
The SAA-C03 objectives are grouped into four weighted domains. Here is the full breakdown with each domain's weighting and the topics it covers — and CertStudio's flashcards and practice questions are tagged to match.
Design Secure Architectures
IAM fundamentals (users vs. roles, identity- vs. resource-based policies, least privilege, MFA, STS, cross-account roles, IAM Identity Center); multi-account governance (AWS Organizations, service control policies, Control Tower, the shared responsibility model, directory federation); VPC network security (security groups vs. network ACLs, public/private subnets, NAT gateway, VPC endpoints, bastion hosts vs. Session Manager, VPC Flow Logs); hybrid and application security services (Site-to-Site VPN vs. Direct Connect, Shield, WAF, GuardDuty, Macie, Cognito); and data security and encryption (KMS and envelope encryption, ACM/TLS, Secrets Manager vs. Parameter Store, S3 versioning and Object Lock, AWS Artifact).
Design Resilient Architectures
Decoupling and messaging (SQS standard vs. FIFO queues, dead-letter queues, SNS fan-out, EventBridge); compute and container patterns (stateless vs. stateful design, microservices and multi-tier architecture, ECS vs. EKS, Fargate, Step Functions); APIs and load balancing (API Gateway, ALB vs. NLB vs. Gateway Load Balancer, Auto Scaling group health checks, cross-zone load balancing); high availability and databases (Regions/AZs/edge locations, RDS Multi-AZ, read replicas, RDS Proxy, Route 53 failover routing); and disaster recovery and observability (backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active, RPO vs. RTO, immutable infrastructure, AWS X-Ray).
Design High-Performing Architectures
Storage performance (S3 performance and request rates, EBS volume types, Amazon EFS, EC2 instance store, object vs. file vs. block storage); compute performance (EC2 instance families, Auto Scaling policies, sizing Lambda memory and concurrency, AWS Batch, Amazon EMR); database performance (Aurora performance features, DynamoDB capacity modes and partition keys, DAX, ElastiCache Redis vs. Memcached, choosing a database for the access pattern); networking performance (CloudFront, Global Accelerator, PrivateLink, EC2 placement groups); and data ingestion and analytics (Kinesis Data Streams vs. Firehose, Glue and Athena, DataSync vs. Storage Gateway).
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Cost management tools (Cost Explorer, Budgets, cost allocation tags and the Cost and Usage Report); storage cost optimization (S3 storage classes, S3 Lifecycle policies, right-sizing EBS volumes, backup and archival strategy, S3 Requester Pays); compute cost optimization (EC2 pricing models, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances vs. Savings Plans, right-sizing and the Fargate vs. EC2 trade-off, hibernation and scaling to zero for non-production); database cost optimization (Aurora Serverless, DynamoDB on-demand vs. provisioned capacity, RDS Reserved Instances and backup retention tuning); and network cost optimization (NAT gateway cost optimization, data transfer cost awareness).
Weightings are set by AWS's published SAA-C03 exam guide. CertStudio's all-domains mock quiz samples questions in these same proportions so a practice exam mirrors the real weighting.
Sample AWS Solutions Architect Associate practice questions
Every SAA-C03 practice question is a single-best-answer scenario with an explanation that also says why the runner-up answers are wrong. Here are three real examples from the bank.
An application running on an EC2 instance needs to read and write objects in an S3 bucket. A security review requires that no long-term access keys ever be stored on the instance. What should the architect configure?
An IAM role attached through an instance profile lets the instance obtain automatically rotated temporary credentials with no keys stored on disk, satisfying the requirement exactly. Embedding IAM user keys or root keys puts long-term credentials on the instance — precisely what's prohibited — and Cognito identity pools are designed for end-user mobile/web app access, not for an EC2 workload's own AWS API calls.
A leaderboard application repeatedly queries the same small set of hot items in DynamoDB, and read latency needs to drop from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds without significant application rework.
DAX is a purpose-built, DynamoDB-API-compatible in-memory cache that reduces read latency to microseconds for repeatedly accessed items with minimal application changes, directly matching the requirement. Changing capacity mode affects cost and scaling behavior, not raw latency down to microsecond levels; DynamoDB doesn't have a 'read replica' concept the way RDS does (Global Tables solve a different, cross-Region problem); and item size limits are unrelated to the read latency of hot items.
A media company stores user-generated content with unpredictable access patterns — some files are viewed heavily right after upload, others become popular again months later with no clear pattern. They want to minimize storage cost without risking retrieval fees or manually managing tiering.
Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between access tiers based on actual observed access patterns with no retrieval fees, exactly matching an unpredictable pattern. Standard-IA and One Zone-IA both charge a retrieval fee that could add up unexpectedly if files are accessed more often than assumed, and Glacier Deep Archive has retrieval times far too long for content that may need to be served quickly when it suddenly becomes popular again.
What you get with CertStudio
Progress is tracked separately by domain, timed quizzes adapt as you improve, and a full-length 65-question mock mirrors the real SAA-C03 weighting. CertStudio's flashcards and quizzes build the scenario-reasoning skills the real exam tests, but we don't simulate the AWS console itself.
Pricing
$22.95
one-time payment · 30 days of full access
No subscription, no auto-renew, and no card kept on file. One payment covers the full AWS Solutions Architect Associate flashcard and practice-question bank.
Create your account to get startedAWS Solutions Architect Associate FAQ
What are the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) exam objectives?
The SAA-C03 objectives are organized into four weighted domains: 1 Design Secure Architectures (30%), 2 Design Resilient Architectures (26%), 3 Design High-Performing Architectures (24%), and 4 Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%). Security and resiliency together make up more than half the exam.
How many questions are on the SAA-C03 exam?
65 questions in 130 minutes: 50 are scored and 15 are unscored (used by AWS to evaluate future questions), but you are never told which is which, so every question should be treated as if it counts. The format mixes multiple choice and multiple response.
What's the passing score for AWS Solutions Architect Associate?
720 on a scale of 100 to 1,000. It is a scaled score, so it does not map directly to a percentage of questions answered correctly.
How much does the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam cost?
AWS charges $150 USD to sit the exam, paid directly to AWS when you schedule it — see their official certification page for current pricing. That fee is separate from, and unrelated to, CertStudio’s practice-question price.
Do I need experience with AWS before taking this exam?
There is no hard prerequisite certification or mandatory experience. AWS recommends around one year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions on AWS, but it is a recommendation, not a requirement — motivated candidates without that background can and do pass with focused study.
Are CertStudio AWS SAA-C03 practice questions available now?
Yes. CertStudio's AWS Solutions Architect Associate practice questions and flashcards are live, covering all four SAA-C03 domains with single-best-answer scenarios and explanations. Create an account to start practicing for a one-time $22.95 — no subscription.
Is this for the current SAA-C03 exam, or the retired SAA-C02?
This guide targets the current SAA-C03 exam. The previous SAA-C02 code is retired — study the SAA-C03 objectives.
Is the Solutions Architect Associate exam hard, and how long does it take to study?
It is a broad, scenario-heavy exam that expects you to choose the BEST of several plausible-sounding AWS services for a given constraint, not just recognize a service by name. Many candidates study for roughly 6–10 weeks with consistent practice. Domain-tagged flashcards and practice questions help you focus on weak areas.
Ready to start studying for AWS Solutions Architect Associate?
94 flashcards, 165 practice questions, all four SAA-C03 domains, one-time payment.
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