AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Complete Study Guide
Practice as you learn. Every concept below maps to real exam questions with verified answers in the AWS/Amazon exam hub, or drill the full exam with timed, personalized practice on ExamRoll.io.
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam spans thirteen domains. This guide covers each in depth — pick a domain to go deep, or work through them in order. Every section includes the AWS services, the correct architecture patterns, and the traps the exam is built to catch.
The domains
- Compute, Auto Scaling & Instance Management — EC2 families, Auto Scaling, load balancers, Lambda/Fargate, and the compute traps.
- Containers & Orchestration — ECS vs EKS, Fargate, IRSA, autoscaling pods/tasks/nodes, and migration patterns.
- Serverless & Event-driven Architectures / API Integration — Lambda, API Gateway, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, and streaming.
- Storage & Data Lifecycle — S3 classes & lifecycle, encryption, EBS/EFS/FSx, and hybrid storage.
- Data Transfer & Migration — Snow family, DataSync, DMS/SCT, MGN, Direct Connect, and Outposts.
- Networking & Connectivity — VPC design, endpoints, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, load balancers, Route 53.
- Content Delivery, Edge & Performance Optimization — CloudFront, OAC, Global Accelerator, WAF/Shield, and ACM certificates.
- Databases & Caching — RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, DAX, ElastiCache, and purpose-built databases.
- Analytics, Data Lake, ML & Specialized Workloads — Athena, Glue, EMR, Redshift, Kinesis, OpenSearch, SageMaker, HPC.
- Application Integration, Messaging & Streaming — SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Amazon MQ, Kinesis, and selection trade-offs.
- Security, IAM, KMS & Governance — IAM roles & policies, KMS, Organizations/SCPs, secrets, threat detection.
- Management, Operations, Observability & Cost — CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Config, Systems Manager, and cost controls.
- High Availability, Fault Tolerance & Disaster Recovery — Multi-AZ vs cross-Region, backups, Vault Lock, DR strategies, and traps.
Ready to practice?
- Browse every SAA-C03 question with verified answers → — free, with explanations.
- Start timed practice tests on ExamRoll.io → — the full question bank, weak-area targeting, in 20+ languages.
Pass the whole exam — not just this question
You found this answer. Get every verified question and explanation in one place, and save hours of prep. Free to start.
Pass your exam →