AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam Overview

AWS publishes the SAA-C03 format as 65 multiple-choice or multiple-response questions with a 130-minute duration. The exam guide states that 50 questions affect the score and 15 are unscored. The official scored domains are Design Secure Architectures at 30%, Design Resilient Architectures at 26%, Design High-Performing Architectures at 24%, and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures at 20%.

AWS says the exam is intended for people who perform a solutions architect role and recommends at least one year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions with AWS services. That does not mean the certification is limited to people with the job title. It means the exam expects design reasoning, not just administration steps or service-name memorization.

Prepare by comparing design options. For security, practice IAM, KMS, ACM, WAF, Shield, Organizations, and network controls. For resilience, practice Multi-AZ patterns, backups, Auto Scaling, ELB, Route 53, SQS, and disaster recovery. For performance, compare compute, storage, database, caching, CDN, and networking choices. For cost, compare storage tiers, purchasing models, right-sizing, and managed service tradeoffs.

Practice questions are useful when they teach why a design fits. Avoid treating a practice set mix as the exam blueprint. Use the official AWS domains for scope, and use each missed question to identify the architecture tradeoff: security boundary, failover pattern, latency constraint, scaling model, data durability, operational complexity, or cost control.