AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional: Skills Measured

This official domain covers complex organizations, not just individual workloads. Study multi-account strategy with AWS Organizations, SCPs, IAM Identity Center, centralized logging, shared services, hybrid connectivity, and cost visibility. The exam may ask which boundary belongs in an account, organization unit, policy, identity permission, network path, or logging architecture.

New-solution design tests whether you can choose architectures for continuity, security, reliability, performance, and cost. Examples include selecting Route 53 routing policies, using CloudFront or Global Accelerator for global delivery, choosing ELB and Auto Scaling patterns, deciding between ECS, EKS, Lambda, and Step Functions, and designing event-driven decoupling with SQS, SNS, and EventBridge.

Improvement scenarios start with an existing workload and ask how to reduce risk, cost, latency, operational burden, or security exposure. Review design changes such as adding WAF, Shield, KMS, ACM, AWS Backup, observability, right-sizing, managed database features, multi-AZ resilience, and automation. The best answer usually improves the requirement without introducing unnecessary complexity.

Migration and modernization questions test strategy selection. Compare rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, and retain decisions; understand how AWS Migration Hub, Storage Gateway, FSx, Outposts, database migration, and application discovery can support migration planning. Modernization may involve containers, serverless, managed databases, event-driven integration, and phased cutovers.

Service knowledge matters only when tied to requirements. Know how Organizations differs from IAM, how Direct Connect differs from VPN, how DynamoDB Global Tables differs from Aurora Global Database, how CloudFront differs from Global Accelerator, and how AWS Backup differs from application-level replication. SAP-C02 expects those distinctions to be applied to architecture tradeoffs.