AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
AWS's design exam for people who plan systems on AWS. Practice the trade-offs it tests: locking down access and data, keeping workloads up through failures, picking storage, compute and databases that perform, and keeping the bill in check. Every question is original and maps to AWS's current SAA-C03 exam guide.
What you'll study
Every section follows the official SAA-C03 exam outline. Click a domain to see its sections.
Shared responsibility, the root user, MFA and IAM, roles, STS and resource policies, multi-account security and federation, VPC segmentation, app credentials, threat protection, private endpoints and hybrid links, encryption and key management, and data governance and backup.
Microservice, event-driven and multi-tier design, queues and loose coupling, APIs, serverless and containers, scaling, load balancing and caching, choosing storage, disaster recovery and failover, Multi-AZ and multi-Region availability, and automation and monitoring.
High-performing storage, compute services and sizing, elastic scaling, database types, engines, capacity, read replicas and caching, network design, edge services and load balancing, data ingestion, streaming and transfer, and data lakes and analytics.
Cost tools and tags, cost-effective storage, tiers and lifecycles, backup, archival and transfer costs, purchasing options and instance selection, cost-effective databases, caching and backups, and NAT, routing, connectivity, CDN and data transfer costs.
Study, Quiz, Exam
Read the concepts, practice in short rounds, then test yourself on a mock exam with targeted feedback on where you need to focus more. Every question is original and maps to the official SAA-C03 outline.
Learn the concept first
Short study cards cover each section before you answer a single question.
AWS managed policies serve many customers at once and tend to grant too much, so least privilege means a customer managed policy naming only the needed actions and resources. An explicit deny beats any allow, which removes a few actions from a broad grant. Conditions narrow where a request may come from.
- Permissions boundary: ceiling on what identity policies can grant
- aws:SourceIp: requester's public IP, present on internet requests
- aws:VpcSourceIp: present only for requests through a VPC endpoint
Ten-question rounds
Every answer explained. Score 80% and the next section unlocks.
Which control BEST meets this requirement across the account?
Account-level S3 Block Public Access settings override bucket policies and ACLs that would grant public access, and they apply to all current and future buckets in the account. SSE-S3 decrypts objects for any request the bucket policy allows, so it does not stop public reads. Server access logging only shows access after it happens, and versioning helps recover overwritten objects but does not block anyone from reading them.
Know exactly where to focus
Timed practice exams any time, with a study plan built from your mistakes.
What to expect on the SAA-C03
Made for anyone who designs systems on AWS, or wants to. AWS recommends a year of hands-on experience, but that's a recommendation, not a requirement.
Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) exam guide, checked October 16, 2026
Where this cert takes you
Real job titles where SAA-C03 skills are the day-to-day work.
- Cloud Engineer
- Cloud Support Engineer
- Junior Solutions Architect
- AWS Cloud Administrator
- Systems Engineer
- Cloud Operations Engineer
- AWS Solutions Architect
- Cloud Architect
- DevOps Engineer
- Infrastructure Engineer
- Site Reliability Engineer
- Cloud Security Engineer
- Senior Solutions Architect
- Senior Cloud Architect
- Enterprise Architect
- Principal Cloud Engineer
- Platform Engineering Lead
- Cloud Infrastructure Architect
Ranges based on BLS Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics (May 2025) for Computer Network Architects: 10th percentile $79,900, median $134,050, 90th percentile $202,680. BLS has no separate cloud architect occupation and counts cloud architects under computer network architects. Adjusted by metro. The first role in each column is the most common entry point.
Recommended ProCourse
A good course to pair with your cert study for learning hard tech skills while you study for your cert
DevOps & Infrastructure
Build it, ship it, keep it running. Containerize with Docker, deploy with Terraform, orchestrate with Kubernetes, and monitor everything with Prometheus and Grafana. The full stack from first commit to production alert.
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