AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate: Skills Measured

The AWS exam guide defines four scored SAA-C03 domains: Design Secure Architectures at 30%, Design Resilient Architectures at 26%, Design High-Performing Architectures at 24%, and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures at 20%. Use these official weights instead of local practice-bank counts.

Security design includes IAM roles and policies, least privilege, network segmentation, security groups, network ACLs, KMS, ACM, WAF, Shield, Organizations, resource policies, and data protection. The exam often asks which control protects access, encrypts data, blocks traffic, or reduces blast radius.

Resilience includes Multi-AZ design, load balancing, Auto Scaling, backups, replication, SQS decoupling, Route 53 failover, disaster recovery patterns, and service selection for fault tolerance. Know the difference between high availability, durability, backup, and disaster recovery.

Performance design includes compute choice, storage performance, database scaling, caching, content delivery, async processing, network latency, and service quotas. Compare EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS, EBS, EFS, S3, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, CloudFront, API Gateway, and messaging services by workload need.

Cost optimization includes right-sizing, storage classes, lifecycle policies, purchasing options, serverless choices, managed services, caching, data transfer, and avoiding overprovisioning. The correct answer usually meets the requirement with the least unnecessary capacity, complexity, or operational burden.