What's on the Solutions Architect exam

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) validates your ability to design solutions on AWS that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-effective. It is one of the most widely pursued cloud certifications in the industry and assumes roughly a year of hands-on experience designing or operating AWS workloads.

Domains covered

The exam is organized into weighted domains. The percentages indicate roughly how much of the exam each domain represents, which is a useful guide for allocating study time.

Design Secure Architectures 30%

Designing secure access to AWS resources, secure workloads and applications, and appropriate data security controls using services like IAM, security groups, and encryption.

Design Resilient Architectures 26%

Building scalable and loosely coupled architectures, and designing for high availability and fault tolerance across Availability Zones and Regions.

Design High-Performing Architectures 24%

Selecting performant storage, compute, database, and networking solutions, and knowing when to introduce caching or scaling.

Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20%

Choosing cost-effective storage, compute, and database options, and applying the right pricing models to control spend.

How to prepare

The exam is scenario-driven: most questions describe a situation and ask for the best design given competing constraints. That means recognizing trade-offs — between cost and resilience, or performance and simplicity — matters more than memorizing service facts. Timed practice papers are especially valuable because they train you to read long scenarios efficiently within the 130-minute limit.

Exam formats and passing scores are updated periodically by AWS. Always confirm the current details on the official AWS certification page before booking your exam.