Study guide · Exam overview
The format, passing score, and four content domains of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam, plus the design choices worth practicing before you book SAA-C03.
Exam version notice: This overview follows the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Exam Guide (SAA-C03). The guide lists four domains, 50 scored questions plus 15 unscored questions, and a scaled passing score of 720. Pricing, languages, and delivery options can change. Confirm them on the AWS certification site before you register. Items tagged Extra are useful context that the exam guide places out of scope. If core service names are still new, start with the Cloud Practitioner overview.
SAA-C03 checks whether you can design a solution on AWS, not whether you can click through a console. The exam guide says the target candidate performs a solutions architect role and has at least one year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions. The work is to meet a stated requirement for security, resilience, performance, or cost, then pick the service and the pattern that fit.
A question usually gives a constraint: a recovery time, a compliance rule, a traffic spike, or a budget. Two options often both “work.” The better answer is the one that satisfies the constraint with the least extra risk or spend. Read the noun the stem cares about: who can call the API, which failure you must survive, how fast the data must return, or what the bill must stop doing.
Figures below come from the SAA-C03 exam guide and the AWS certification pages reviewed in October 2026.
| Specification | SAA-C03 |
|---|---|
| Level | Associate. There is no required prerequisite certification. |
| Number of questions | 65. Fifty affect your score. Fifteen are unscored and are not identified on the exam. |
| Question types | Multiple choice (one correct answer and three distractors) and multiple response (two or more correct answers out of five or more options). |
| Length of test | 130 minutes. AWS offers an additional 30 minutes for eligible non-native English speakers who request the ESL accommodation before they register. |
| Passing score | 720 on a scaled range of 100–1,000. Scoring is compensatory: you pass the exam as a whole, not each domain. |
| Recommended experience | At least 1 year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions that use AWS services. |
| Exam price | Associate exams are listed at 150 USD. Taxes and local-currency prices can differ. Confirm the current fee before you book. |
| Validity | Three years. Confirm the current recertification options with AWS. |
Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect. There is no penalty for guessing, so answer every question. A scaled score of 720 is not the same thing as 72 percent of the questions. The exam uses official short names, and the in-exam Help lists the matching full service names.
These percentages are the share of scored content in the official exam guide. The 200 practice questions on this site follow the same weights.
The largest domain. Access, workload placement, and data controls.
Keep working through a spike and through a failure.
Pick the storage, compute, database, and path that meet the speed you were given.
The same building blocks, judged by the bill.
The exam guide publishes an in-scope list and an out-of-scope list. Learn the in-scope services first. The same map is in the core notes and flashcards.
| Design need | Prefer | Remember |
|---|---|---|
| Workforce access to many accounts | AWS IAM Identity Center | Amazon Cognito is for your application's users, not your employees' console access. |
| Temporary cross-account access | IAM role with AWS STS | A long-lived access key on an IAM user is the pattern to retire. |
| Cap what member accounts can do | Service control policy | An SCP sets a maximum. It does not grant permission by itself. |
| Admin access without SSH | Systems Manager Session Manager | A bastion host in a public subnet opens a path you then have to guard. |
| Block SQL injection at the edge | AWS WAF | AWS Shield is for DDoS. Amazon GuardDuty detects; it does not filter requests. |
| Keys you manage, used by AWS services | AWS KMS | AWS CloudHSM is the dedicated module when KMS control is not enough. |
| Survive one Availability Zone | Multi-AZ plus a load balancer | A second Region is for a regional disaster, not for a single-zone failure. |
| Absorb a burst of work | Amazon SQS in front of workers | Amazon SNS fans a message out. It does not hold it for one consumer. |
| Readable copies of a relational database | Read replicas | RDS Multi-AZ is a standby for failover. The standby is not a read endpoint. |
| Cache HTTP close to users | Amazon CloudFront | AWS Global Accelerator improves the network path. It is not a cache. |
| Private access to Amazon S3 | Gateway VPC endpoint | A NAT gateway works, and it charges you for traffic that never needed the internet. |
| Interruptible batch compute | Spot Instances | A Savings Plan is a commit for steady usage, not a way to run disposable jobs. |
| Extra Simple virtual servers | Amazon Lightsail | Listed as out of scope in the SAA-C03 exam guide. Design with Amazon EC2 and the VPC controls instead. |
| Extra Infrastructure code in a programming language | AWS CDK | Listed as out of scope. AWS CloudFormation is the in-scope infrastructure-as-code service. |
Multiple choice has one correct response and three distractors. Multiple response has two or more correct responses out of five or more options. The stem tells you how many to choose. Select every response that completes the statement, and nothing extra.
Distractors are real services that solve a nearby problem. If the need is “a durable standby in a second Availability Zone,” a cross-Region active-active design is the nearby wrong answer: it works, and it costs more than the requirement asked for. If the need is “find sensitive data already stored in Amazon S3,” AWS WAF is the nearby wrong answer because it inspects requests, not objects at rest.
Words such as MOST, BEST, and LEAST are the constraint. MOST cost-effective still has to meet the recovery or performance number in the stem. LEAST operational overhead usually means a managed service. There is no published penalty for a wrong guess. A blank answer is incorrect.
A practical sequence once you can already name the core services.
For a new account, say who gets a role, what an SCP can and cannot do, and where a security group sits compared with a network ACL.
One map is Availability Zones inside a Region. The other is a second Region. Put RPO and RTO on the second map before you pick a recovery strategy.
Object, file, or block. Relational joins, or a key lookup. Then decide whether a cache or a read replica is what the latency number actually needs.
Take a correct design and ask what you would change if the stem said “lowest cost” instead of “lowest recovery time.” Spot, storage class, and NAT versus a gateway endpoint are the usual levers.
Use the four decks until you can answer before the card flips. Revisit misses the next day.
Work through original questions at about two minutes each, review every explanation, and return to the notes on domains below 75 percent. Aim for a steady 85 percent before you book.
The overview, core notes, flashcards, and practice exams are all published.
Exam format, the 720 passing score, domain weights, and a study plan.
Reference notes for access, resilience, performance choices, and cost levers.
40 recall cards in four decks, plus memory notes for controls, recovery, and cost.
200 original questions with custom exams, explanations, and a score report by domain.
The current associate architect exam in the AWS exam guide is SAA-C03. This overview follows that guide. Confirm the code on the AWS certification page before you book, because AWS can retire an exam version.
Results use a scaled score from 100 to 1,000. The minimum passing score is 720. You do not need a passing score in every domain. A scaled score is not the percentage of questions you answered correctly.
The exam has 65 questions and a 130-minute time limit. Fifty questions affect your score. Fifteen are unscored and are not labeled. Question types are multiple choice and multiple response.
There is no required prerequisite certification. AWS describes the target candidate as someone with at least 1 year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions that use AWS services.
AWS certifications are valid for three years. Recertification options can change, so confirm the current policy with AWS before your expiration date.
No. The practice questions on this site are original. They are not AWS exam items, and a practice score does not predict a result.
Service names and prices change. Use the current AWS exam guide and the AWS certification site as the authority when they differ from these notes.
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