AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) Exam Notes

Exam Overview

Duration: 130 minutes

Number of Questions: 65

Format: Multiple-choice and multiple-answer

Cost: $150 USD

Exam Languages: English, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese

Domains Covered

• Design Resilient Architectures (30%)
• Define Performant Architectures (28%)
• Specify Secure Applications and Architectures (24%)
• Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (18%)

Key Topics

Design Resilient Architectures

• High Availability and Fault Tolerance:
  • Multi-AZ Deployments: Use for RDS, ElastiCache, and other managed services to ensure high availability.
  • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances.
  • Auto Scaling: Automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances based on demand.
  • AWS Route 53: DNS service that can route traffic to healthy endpoints and provide failover.
  • Amazon S3 and Cross-Region Replication (CRR): Store and replicate data across different AWS regions.
• Backup and Recovery:
  • AWS Backup: Centralized backup service for AWS services.
  • Amazon RDS Automated Backups and Snapshots: Ensure database backups and restore capabilities.
  • Versioning in S3: Enable and manage object versions in Amazon S3.

Define Performant Architectures

• Scalability:
  • Amazon EC2 Instance Types: Understand the different instance families and their use cases (e.g., compute-optimized, memory-optimized).
  • Amazon RDS Read Replicas: Improve read performance by replicating the database to multiple instances.
  • Amazon CloudFront: Content delivery network (CDN) to deliver content with low latency.
  • Amazon ElastiCache: In-memory caching for improved application performance.
• Monitoring and Metrics:
  • Amazon CloudWatch: Monitor AWS resources and applications, set up alarms, and create dashboards.
  • AWS X-Ray: Analyze and debug distributed applications.

Specify Secure Applications and Architectures

• Identity and Access Management (IAM):
  • IAM Roles, Policies, and Groups: Manage user permissions and access control.
  • AWS Organizations: Manage and consolidate billing and policies across multiple AWS accounts.
  • AWS Cognito: Provide user sign-up, sign-in, and access control.
• Data Protection:
  • Encryption: Use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for data encryption at rest and in transit.
  • AWS Shield and AWS WAF: Protect against DDoS attacks and manage application firewall rules.
  • VPC Security Groups and NACLs: Control inbound and outbound traffic at the instance and subnet levels.

Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

• Cost Management:
  • AWS Cost Explorer: Analyze cost and usage patterns.
  • AWS Budgets: Set and track budgets for your AWS resources.
  • Savings Plans and Reserved Instances: Save costs by committing to a specific level of usage.
• Resource Optimization:
  • Instance Right-Sizing: Use the AWS Compute Optimizer to choose the most appropriate instance types.
  • Storage Optimization: Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering and Lifecycle Policies to manage storage costs.