AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Study Roadmap

Start with the official SAA-C03 guide. The exam validates design solutions based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, not routine operations. Keep every topic tied to one of the four design lenses: secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized.

Review the AWS services that appear across many designs: IAM, VPC, EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS, S3, EBS, EFS, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Route 53, CloudFront, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, KMS, ACM, WAF, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, API Gateway, and AWS Backup.

For each service, ask what tradeoff it helps with. Does it improve availability, reduce latency, increase durability, lower operational overhead, improve security, simplify scaling, or reduce cost? This keeps study from becoming a list of AWS names and turns it into design reasoning.

Rotate through the official domains. For security, review identity, encryption, and network controls. For resilience, review failover, backups, and decoupling. For performance, review caching, scaling, and database choices. For cost, review rightsizing, storage tiers, serverless, purchasing models, and managed service tradeoffs.

After practice, label each miss with the design principle and service pair involved. Examples include ALB versus NLB, RDS Multi-AZ versus read replica, S3 Standard-IA versus Glacier, SQS versus SNS, NAT Gateway versus VPC endpoint, or DynamoDB on-demand versus provisioned. Those labels tell you what to review next.