AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
The most popular AWS certification. Tests architectural decision-making across the Well-Architected pillars — the certification CloudCertPrep covers most deeply.
- Exam questions
- 65
- Duration
- 130 min
- Exam cost
- $150 USD
- Passing score
- 720/1000
81 reviewed practice questions live on this site · Official AWS certification page
Exam domains and weights
Secure access to AWS resources, secure workloads and applications, and data security controls.
Scalable, loosely coupled, highly available, fault-tolerant architectures and disaster recovery.
High-performing compute, storage, database, and network solutions that scale with demand.
Cost-optimized storage, compute, database, and network architectures for workload requirements.
Practice topics
IAM users, roles, policies, least privilege, MFA, and cross-account access patterns.
Security groups, network ACLs, AWS WAF, Shield, and securing VPC traffic.
KMS, encryption at rest and in transit, Secrets Manager, and certificate management.
Multi-AZ design, Elastic Load Balancing, Route 53 routing, and eliminating single points of failure.
SQS, SNS, EventBridge, and loose coupling patterns that absorb failures.
RTO/RPO trade-offs, backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site designs.
S3 durability and versioning, EBS snapshots, EFS, and storage-level fault tolerance.
Choosing between EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS, and batch/edge compute options.
RDS vs Aurora vs DynamoDB, read replicas, partitioning, and caching with ElastiCache/DAX.
CloudFront, global acceleration, ElastiCache strategies, and latency reduction.
Auto Scaling policies, scaling metrics, and designing for variable demand.
S3 storage classes, lifecycle policies, and matching storage tiers to access patterns.
On-Demand vs Savings Plans vs Reserved vs Spot, right-sizing, and serverless cost levers.
Aurora vs RDS vs DynamoDB cost profiles, data transfer costs, and NAT Gateway spend.
How to prepare for SAA-C03
Learn the blueprint
Start with the domain weights above — they tell you exactly where exam points are concentrated.
Official exam pageStudy the core services
Work through service-focused study guides for the services that appear most in this exam's questions.
Service study guides →Practice by topic
Take focused question sets per topic, read every per-option explanation — including why wrong answers are wrong.
All practice topics →Simulate the real exam
Take a timed mock exam at real pace (~2 min per question) and review every miss.
Mock exams →Close the gaps
Use your domain breakdown to find weak areas, bookmark tricky questions, and re-drill them before exam day.
Build a study plan →
81 reviewed SAA-C03 questions available
Practice interactively, or browse every question with answers and explanations.