AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate syllabus

The domain weightings on this exam were revised in place, under the same SAA-C03 code, and most study material has not caught up. The widely circulated 26, 24, 24 and 26 split is the original 2022 launch weighting. The current exam guide gives 30, 26, 24 and 20.

Security gained four points and cost optimisation lost six, which makes Design Secure Architectures the heaviest domain by a clear margin and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures the lightest. Anyone budgeting revision time against the old numbers is giving cost optimisation a third more attention than it now earns.

A second correction worth making early: there is no SAA-C04. SAA-C03 is the current exam code and no successor has been announced. Pages describing an SAA-C04 exist and tend to attribute the current weightings to it while giving the historic figures for SAA-C03, which is the reverse of the truth.

The four domains are below. Browse the available AWS Solutions Architect practice papers.

Syllabus by section

Fourteen task statements across the four domains. Note that the number of task statements does not track the weighting: Domain 1 carries the most marks from the fewest tasks, and Domain 3 the reverse.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate at a glance

Exam pattern

SAA-C03, one sitting

Two question types are used. Multiple choice has one correct response and three distractors. Multiple response has two or more correct responses among five or more options. The newer ordering, matching and case study formats AWS has introduced elsewhere are not used on this exam.

Fifteen of the 65 questions do not count. They are being trialled for future use and they are not marked on the screen, so there is no way to identify them and no reason to try. Treat all 65 as live.

There is no penalty for a wrong answer and an unanswered question is scored as incorrect, which makes leaving anything blank strictly worse than guessing.

The scoring model is compensatory, so a weak domain can be carried by a strong one. The exam report gives section level feedback, but it should be read carefully because the domains carry different weights.

How the pattern has changed

The exam code, the question count, the duration, the pass mark and the price have all held. The changes have been to the weightings and to the way questions are written.

• The domain weightings were revised in place from 26, 24, 24 and 26 to 30, 26, 24 and 20, under the same SAA-C03 code and with no change to the exam guide version number

• AWS now uses official short service names on the exam to cut the reading load, so Amazon Simple Notification Service appears as Amazon SNS. A help feature on every question lists the short names against the full ones

• The in-scope service list has been refreshed with current service names

• The exam in Italian retires after 31 December 2026, taking the number of available languages from ten to nine

Two adjacent exams are being replaced in this cycle, which is the likely source of the SAA-C04 confusion. Solutions Architect Professional moves from SAP-C02 to SAP-C03, and Developer Associate from DVA-C02 to DVA-C03. Neither is this exam.

Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures, 30%

• Task 1.1: design secure access to AWS resources, covering IAM users, groups, roles and policies, federated access, cross account access through AWS STS, service control policies and AWS Control Tower, resource policies, and the shared responsibility model

• Task 1.2: design secure workloads and applications, covering VPC security components such as security groups, route tables, network ACLs and NAT gateways, network segmentation into public and private subnets, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, Amazon Cognito, AWS Secrets Manager, and secure external connections through VPN and AWS Direct Connect

• Task 1.3: determine appropriate data security controls, covering encryption at rest with AWS KMS, encryption in transit with AWS Certificate Manager and TLS, key policies and rotation, data classification and retention, and backup and replication

The heaviest domain and the one with the fewest task statements, which concentrates a lot of marks into three areas. The full Secure Architectures breakdown covers all three.

Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures, 26%

• Task 2.1: design scalable and loosely coupled architectures, covering Amazon API Gateway, Amazon SQS and messaging patterns, caching, microservices and stateless design, event driven architecture, horizontal and vertical scaling, containers on Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, serverless with AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, load balancing, read replicas, and AWS Step Functions

• Task 2.2: design highly available and fault tolerant architectures, covering Regions and Availability Zones, Amazon Route 53, disaster recovery strategies from backup and restore through pilot light and warm standby to active-active, RPO and RTO, failover, immutable infrastructure, service quotas and throttling, and durability and replication of storage

Two task statements carrying 26 per cent, which makes this the densest domain per task. The full Resilient Architectures breakdown covers both.

Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures, 24%

• Task 3.1: determine high-performing and scalable storage solutions, across Amazon S3, Amazon EFS and Amazon EBS, plus hybrid storage

• Task 3.2: design high-performing and elastic compute solutions, covering AWS Batch, Amazon EMR, AWS Fargate, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Auto Scaling, container orchestration and the sizing of compute resources

• Task 3.3: determine high-performing database solutions, covering Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, read replicas, proxies, capacity planning and read against write access patterns

• Task 3.4: determine high-performing and scalable network architectures, covering Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, subnet tiers and IP addressing, load balancing and the choice between AWS VPN, AWS Direct Connect and AWS PrivateLink

• Task 3.5: determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions, covering Amazon Athena, AWS Lake Formation, AWS Glue, Amazon Kinesis, AWS DataSync, AWS Storage Gateway and data lake design

Five task statements for 24 per cent, the widest domain and the thinnest per task. The full High-Performing Architectures breakdown covers all five.

Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures, 20%

• Task 4.1: design cost-optimised storage solutions, covering storage tiering, S3 object lifecycles, block storage choices between HDD and SSD, backup and archival, and the cheapest route for migrating data in

• Task 4.2: design cost-optimised compute solutions, covering Spot Instances, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, instance families and sizes, hibernation, and the choice between AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate

• Task 4.3: design cost-optimised database solutions, covering engine and type selection, serverless databases, backup and retention policies, plus caching

• Task 4.4: design cost-optimised network architectures, covering NAT gateway placement and cost, VPC endpoints, AWS Transit Gateway and peering, data transfer charges between Regions and Availability Zones, and CDN and edge caching

All four tasks repeat the same two cost management knowledge points, being cost allocation tags and multi account billing, and the tooling of AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets and the AWS Cost and Usage Report. Learn those once. The full Cost-Optimized Architectures breakdown covers all four tasks.

What is not in the syllabus

• No ordering, matching or case study question types. This exam uses multiple choice and multiple response only

• No negative marking

• No prerequisite certification

• No hands-on or lab component. The exam is entirely multiple choice

• Services AWS lists as out of scope, including Amazon Lightsail, Amazon GameLift, Amazon Braket, AWS Ground Station, the AWS Elemental media services, all Internet of Things services, and the developer tooling such as AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy and the AWS CDK

How to spend the time

Allocate against 30, 26, 24 and 20. Security is now almost a third of the exam, and it is the domain most candidates under prepare because the older weighting put it level with cost optimisation.

Learn the cost management tooling once rather than four times. Cost allocation tags, multi account billing, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets and the Cost and Usage Report appear in all four Domain 4 tasks, so the domain is narrower than its four task statements suggest.

Work from the in-scope service list rather than from the AWS console. The list is long but finite, and the out-of-scope list is explicit about what will not appear, which is a faster way to bound revision than exploring services at random.

Answer every question. There is no penalty, an unanswered question is marked incorrect, and 15 of the 65 do not count anyway. Browse the available AWS Solutions Architect practice papers.

Common mistakes

• Budgeting revision against the old 26, 24, 24 and 26 weighting

• Studying material that describes an SAA-C04, which does not exist

• Trying to identify the 15 unscored questions, which are not marked

• Leaving questions blank, when an unanswered question is scored as incorrect

• Expecting to pass each domain separately, when the scoring model is compensatory

• Preparing out-of-scope services such as Amazon Lightsail or the AWS developer tooling

• Learning full service names when the exam now uses official short names

• Assuming the Professional exam transition applies to this one

Against Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Professional

Cloud Practitioner and this exam both run 65 questions, so the question count is the least useful comparison between them. The real gap is the extra 40 minutes, which exists because Associate questions are scenario judgements rather than recall.

Passing the Professional exam renews an Associate certification for three years, so for anyone already holding this one, a Professional attempt does double duty.

Frequently asked questions

Is SAA-C03 still the current exam?

Yes. SAA-C03 is the current exam code and AWS has announced no successor and no retirement date for the English exam.

Does SAA-C04 exist?

No. Pages describing an SAA-C04 are inaccurate, and they typically present the current weightings as belonging to it while giving the historic figures for SAA-C03.

What are the current domain weightings?

Design Secure Architectures 30 per cent, Design Resilient Architectures 26 per cent, Design High-Performing Architectures 24 per cent, Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20 per cent.

How many questions are scored?

Fifty of the 65. The other 15 are unscored and are not identified on the exam.

What is the passing score?

720 on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000.

Do I have to pass each domain?

No. The scoring model is compensatory, so only the overall exam has to be passed.

Is there negative marking?

No. There is no penalty for guessing, and an unanswered question is scored as incorrect.

Do I need another certification first?

No. AWS certifications have no prerequisites. The recommendation is at least one year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions on AWS.

How long is the certification valid?

Three years. It can be renewed by retaking the current version of the exam, by passing a higher level exam, or through a Skill Builder maintenance route within 90 days of expiry.

How soon can I retake it after failing?

After 14 calendar days. There is no limit on the number of attempts, though the full fee applies each time.

Can I retake it after passing?

Not for two years on the same exam, unless AWS issues a new exam guide and series code.

Which question types does the exam use?

Multiple choice and multiple response only. The ordering, matching and case study types AWS has introduced on some other exams are not used here.