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

Introduction
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam is intended for individuals who perform in a solutions architect role. The exam validates a candidate’s ability to use AWS technologies to design solutions based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The exam also validates a candidate’s ability to complete the following tasks:
• Design solutions that incorporate AWS services to meet current business requirements and future projected needs
• Design architectures that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized
• Review existing solutions and determine improvements

Target candidate description
The target candidate should have at least 1 year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions that use AWS services.
For a detailed list of specific tools and technologies that might be covered on the exam, as well as lists of in-scope and out-of-scope AWS services, refer to the Appendix.

Exam content Response types
There are two types of questions on the exam:
• Multiple choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors)
• Multiple response: Has two or more correct responses out of five or more response options

Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that a candidate with incomplete knowledge or skill might choose. Distractors are generally plausible responses that match the content area.

Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing. The exam includes 50 questions that will affect your score.

Unscored content
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.

Exam results
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is a pass or fail exam. The exam is scored against a minimum standard established by AWS professionals who follow certification industry best practices and guidelines.
Your results for the exam are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 720. Your score shows how you performed on the exam as a whole and whether or not you passed. Scaled scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty levels.

Your score report could contain a table of classifications of your performance at each section level. This information provides general feedback about your exam performance. The exam uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to pass only the overall exam.

Each section of the exam has a specific weighting, so some sections have more questions than other sections have. The table contains general information that highlights your strengths and weaknesses. Use caution when interpreting section-level feedback. Candidates who pass the exam will not receive this additional information.

Content outline
This exam guide includes weightings, test domains, and task statements for the exam. It is not a comprehensive listing of the content on the exam. However, additional context for each of the task statements is available to help guide your preparation for the exam. The following table lists the main content domains and their weightings. The table precedes the complete exam content outline, which includes the additional context. The percentage in each domain represents only scored content.

Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures 30%
Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures 26%
Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures 24%
Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20%

Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures
Task Statement 1: Design secure access to AWS resources.

Knowledge of:
• Access controls and management across multiple accounts
• AWS federated access and identity services (for example, AWS Identity and Access Management [IAM], AWS Single Sign-On [AWS SSO])
• AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions)
• AWS security best practices (for example, the principle of least privilege)
• The AWS shared responsibility model

Skills in:
• Applying AWS security best practices to IAM users and root users (for example, multi-factor authentication [MFA])
• Designing a flexible authorization model that includes IAM users, groups, roles, and policies
• Designing a role-based access control strategy (for example, AWS Security Token Service [AWS STS], role switching, cross-account access)
• Designing a security strategy for multiple AWS accounts (for example, AWS Control Tower, service control policies [SCPs])
• Determining the appropriate use of resource policies for AWS services
• Determining when to federate a directory service with IAM roles

Task Statement 2: Design secure workloads and applications.

Knowledge of:
• Application configuration and credentials security
• AWS service endpoints
• Control ports, protocols, and network traffic on AWS
• Secure application access
• Security services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Cognito, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Macie)
• Threat vectors external to AWS (for example, DDoS, SQL injection)

Skills in:
• Designing VPC architectures with security components (for example, security groups, route tables, network ACLs, NAT gateways)
• Determining network segmentation strategies (for example, using public subnets and private subnets)
• Integrating AWS services to secure applications (for example, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, AWS SSO, AWS Secrets Manager)
• Securing external network connections to and from the AWS Cloud (for example, VPN, AWS Direct Connect)

Task Statement 3: Determine appropriate data security controls.
Knowledge of:
• Data access and governance
• Data recovery
• Data retention and classification
• Encryption and appropriate key management

Skills in:
• Aligning AWS technologies to meet compliance requirements
• Encrypting data at rest (for example, AWS Key Management Service [AWS KMS])
• Encrypting data in transit (for example, AWS Certificate Manager [ACM] using TLS)
• Implementing access policies for encryption keys
• Implementing data backups and replications
• Implementing policies for data access, lifecycle, and protection
• Rotating encryption keys and renewing certificates

Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures
Task Statement 1: Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures.

Knowledge of:
• API creation and management (for example, Amazon API Gateway, REST API)
• AWS managed services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Transfer Family, Amazon Simple Queue Service [Amazon SQS], Secrets Manager)
• Caching strategies
• Design principles for microservices (for example, stateless workloads compared with stateful workloads)
• Event-driven architectures
• Horizontal scaling and vertical scaling
• How to appropriately use edge accelerators (for example, content delivery network [CDN])
• How to migrate applications into containers
• Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
• Multi-tier architectures
• Queuing and messaging concepts (for example, publish/subscribe)
• Serverless technologies and patterns (for example, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda)
• Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)
• The orchestration of containers (for example, Amazon Elastic Container Service [Amazon ECS], Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS])
• When to use read replicas
• Workflow orchestration (for example, AWS Step Functions)

Skills in:
• Designing event-driven, microservice, and/or multi-tier architectures based on requirements
• Determining scaling strategies for components used in an architecture design
• Determining the AWS services required to achieve loose coupling based on requirements
• Determining when to use containers
• Determining when to use serverless technologies and patterns
• Recommending appropriate compute, storage, networking, and database technologies based on requirements
• Using purpose-built AWS services for workloads

Task Statement 2: Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures.

Knowledge of:
• AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions, Amazon Route 53)
• AWS managed services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Polly)
• Basic networking concepts (for example, route tables)
• Disaster recovery (DR) strategies (for example, backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active failover, recovery point objective [RPO], recovery time objective [RTO])
• Distributed design patterns
• Failover strategies
• Immutable infrastructure
• Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
• Proxy concepts (for example, Amazon RDS Proxy)
• Service quotas and throttling (for example, how to configure the service quotas for a workload in a standby environment)
• Storage options and characteristics (for example, durability, replication)
• Workload visibility (for example, AWS X-Ray)

Skills in:
• Determining automation strategies to ensure infrastructure integrity
• Determining the AWS services required to provide a highly available and/or fault-tolerant architecture across AWS Regions or Availability Zones
• Identifying metrics based on business requirements to deliver a highly available solution
• Implementing designs to mitigate single points of failure
• Implementing strategies to ensure the durability and availability of data (for example, backups)
• Selecting an appropriate DR strategy to meet business requirements
• Using AWS services that improve the reliability of legacy applications and applications not built for the cloud (for example, when application changes are not possible)
• Using purpose-built AWS services for workloads

Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures
Task Statement 1: Determine high-performing and/or scalable storage solutions.
Knowledge of:
• Hybrid storage solutions to meet business requirements
• Storage services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic File System [Amazon EFS], Amazon Elastic Block Store [Amazon EBS])
• Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)

Skills in:
• Determining storage services and configurations that meet performance demands
• Determining storage services that can scale to accommodate future needs

Task Statement 2: Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions.

Knowledge of:
• AWS compute services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Batch, Amazon EMR, Fargate)
• Distributed computing concepts supported by AWS global infrastructure and edge services
• Queuing and messaging concepts (for example, publish/subscribe)
• Scalability capabilities with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Auto Scaling)
• Serverless technologies and patterns (for example, Lambda, Fargate)
• The orchestration of containers (for example, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS)

Skills in:
• Decoupling workloads so that components can scale independently
• Identifying metrics and conditions to perform scaling actions
• Selecting the appropriate compute options and features (for example, EC2 instance types) to meet business requirements
• Selecting the appropriate resource type and size (for example, the amount of Lambda memory) to meet business requirements

Task Statement 3: Determine high-performing database solutions.
Knowledge of:
• AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions)
• Caching strategies and services (for example, Amazon ElastiCache)
• Data access patterns (for example, read-intensive compared with write-intensive)
• Database capacity planning (for example, capacity units, instance types, Provisioned IOPS)
• Database connections and proxies
• Database engines with appropriate use cases (for example, heterogeneous migrations, homogeneous migrations)
• Database replication (for example, read replicas)
• Database types and services (for example, serverless, relational compared with non-relational, in-memory)

Skills in:
• Configuring read replicas to meet business requirements
• Designing database architectures
• Determining an appropriate database engine (for example, MySQL compared with PostgreSQL)
• Determining an appropriate database type (for example, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB)
• Integrating caching to meet business requirements

Task Statement 4: Determine high-performing and/or scalable network architectures.
Knowledge of:
• Edge networking services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator)
• How to design network architecture (for example, subnet tiers, routing, IP addressing)
• Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
• Network connection options (for example, AWS VPN, Direct Connect, AWS PrivateLink)

Skills in:
• Creating a network topology for various architectures (for example, global, hybrid, multi-tier)
• Determining network configurations that can scale to accommodate future needs
• Determining the appropriate placement of resources to meet business requirements
• Selecting the appropriate load balancing strategy

Task Statement 5: Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions.
Knowledge of:
• Data analytics and visualization services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Athena, AWS Lake Formation, Amazon QuickSight)
• Data ingestion patterns (for example, frequency)
• Data transfer services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS DataSync, AWS Storage Gateway)
• Data transformation services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Glue)
• Secure access to ingestion access points
• Sizes and speeds needed to meet business requirements
• Streaming data services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Kinesis)

Skills in:
• Building and securing data lakes
• Designing data streaming architectures
• Designing data transfer solutions
• Implementing visualization strategies
• Selecting appropriate compute options for data processing (for example, Amazon EMR)
• Selecting appropriate configurations for ingestion
• Transforming data between formats (for example, .csv to .parquet)

Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Task Statement 1: Design cost-optimized storage solutions.
Knowledge of:
• Access options (for example, an S3 bucket with Requester Pays object storage)
• AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
• AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
• AWS storage services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon FSx, Amazon EFS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS)
• Backup strategies
• Block storage options (for example, hard disk drive [HDD] volume types, solid state drive [SSD] volume types)
• Data lifecycles
• Hybrid storage options (for example, DataSync, Transfer Family, Storage Gateway)
• Storage access patterns
• Storage tiering (for example, cold tiering for object storage)
• Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)

Skills in:
• Designing appropriate storage strategies (for example, batch uploads to Amazon S3 compared with individual uploads)
• Determining the correct storage size for a workload
• Determining the lowest cost method of transferring data for a workload to AWS storage
• Determining when storage auto scaling is required
• Managing S3 object lifecycles
• Selecting the appropriate backup and/or archival solution
• Selecting the appropriate service for data migration to storage services
• Selecting the appropriate storage tier
• Selecting the correct data lifecycle for storage
• Selecting the most cost-effective storage service for a workload

Task Statement 2: Design cost-optimized compute solutions.
Knowledge of:
• AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
• AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
• AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions)
• AWS purchasing options (for example, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans)
• Distributed compute strategies (for example, edge processing)
• Hybrid compute options (for example, AWS Outposts, AWS Snowball Edge)
• Instance types, families, and sizes (for example, memory optimized, compute optimized, virtualization)
• Optimization of compute utilization (for example, containers, serverless computing, microservices)
• Scaling strategies (for example, auto scaling, hibernation)

Skills in:
• Determining an appropriate load balancing strategy (for example, Application Load Balancer [Layer 7] compared with Network Load Balancer [Layer 4] compared with Gateway Load Balancer)
• Determining appropriate scaling methods and strategies for elastic workloads (for example, horizontal compared with vertical, EC2 hibernation)
• Determining cost-effective AWS compute services with appropriate use cases (for example, Lambda, Amazon EC2, Fargate)
• Determining the required availability for different classes of workloads (for example, production workloads, non-production workloads)
• Selecting the appropriate instance family for a workload
• Selecting the appropriate instance size for a workload

Task Statement 3: Design cost-optimized database solutions.
Knowledge of:
• AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
• AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
• Caching strategies
• Data retention policies
• Database capacity planning (for example, capacity units)
• Database connections and proxies
• Database engines with appropriate use cases (for example, heterogeneous migrations, homogeneous migrations)
• Database replication (for example, read replicas)
• Database types and services (for example, relational compared with non-relational, Aurora, DynamoDB)

Skills in:
• Designing appropriate backup and retention policies (for example, snapshot frequency)
• Determining an appropriate database engine (for example, MySQL compared with PostgreSQL)
• Determining cost-effective AWS database services with appropriate use cases (for example, DynamoDB compared with Amazon RDS, serverless)
• Determining cost-effective AWS database types (for example, time series format, columnar format)
• Migrating database schemas and data to different locations and/or different database engines

Task Statement 4: Design cost-optimized network architectures.
Knowledge of:
• AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
• AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
• Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
• NAT gateways (for example, NAT instance costs compared with NAT gateway costs)
• Network connectivity (for example, private lines, dedicated lines, VPNs)
• Network routing, topology, and peering (for example, AWS Transit Gateway, VPC peering)
• Network services with appropriate use cases (for example, DNS)

Skills in:
• Configuring appropriate NAT gateway types for a network (for example, a single shared NAT gateway compared with NAT gateways for each Availability Zone)
• Configuring appropriate network connections (for example, Direct Connect compared with VPN compared with internet)
• Configuring appropriate network routes to minimize network transfer costs (for example, Region to Region, Availability Zone to Availability Zone, private to public, Global Accelerator, VPC endpoints)
• Determining strategic needs for content delivery networks (CDNs) and edge caching
• Reviewing existing workloads for network optimizations
• Selecting an appropriate throttling strategy
• Selecting the appropriate bandwidth allocation for a network device (for example, a single VPN compared with multiple VPNs, Direct Connect speed)

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Question 1: 
A software development company is using serverless computing with AWS Lambda to build and run applications without having to set up or manage servers. They have a Lambda function that connects to a MongoDB Atlas, which is a popular Database as a Service (DBaaS) platform and also uses a third party API to fetch certain data for their application. One of the developers was instructed to create the environment variables for the MongoDB database hostname, username, and password as well as the API credentials that will be used by the Lambda function for DEV, SIT, UAT, and PROD environments.
Considering that the Lambda function is storing sensitive database and API credentials, how can this information be secured to prevent other developers in the team, or anyone, from seeing these credentials in plain text? Select the best option that provides maximum security.

A. Enable SSL encryption that leverages on AWS CloudHSM to store and encrypt the sensitive information.
B. AWS Lambda does not provide encryption for the environment variables. Deploy your code to an EC2 instance instead.
C. There is no need to do anything because, by default, AWS Lambda already encrypts the environment variables using the AWS Key Management Service.
D. Create a new KMS key and use it to enable encryption helpers that leverage on AWS Key Management Service to store and encrypt the sensitive information.

Correct Answer: D

Explanation
When you create or update Lambda functions that use environment variables, AWS Lambda encrypts them using the AWS Key Management Service. When your Lambda function is invoked, those values are decrypted and made available to the Lambda code.

The first time you create or update Lambda functions that use environment variables in a region, a default service key is created for you automatically within AWS KMS. This key is used to encrypt environment variables. However, if you wish to use encryption helpers and use KMS to encrypt environment variables after your Lambda function is created, you must create your own AWS KMS key and choose it instead of the default key. The default key will give errors when chosen. Creating your own key gives you more flexibility, including the ability to create, rotate, disable, and define access controls, and to audit the encryption keys used to protect your data.

Question 2: 
A company hosted an e-commerce website on an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The Solutions Architect noticed that the website is receiving a large number of illegitimate external requests from multiple systems with IP addresses that constantly change. To resolve the performance issues, the Solutions Architect must implement a solution that would block the illegitimate requests with minimal impact on legitimate traffic.
Which of the following options fulfills this requirement?

A. Create a regular rule in AWS WAF and associate the web ACL to an Application Load Balancer.
B. Create a rate-based rule in AWS WAF and associate the web ACL to an Application Load Balancer.
C. Create a custom rule in the security group of the Application Load Balancer to block the offending requests.
D. Create a custom network ACL and associate it with the subnet of the Application Load Balancer to block the offending requests.

Correct Answer: B

Question 4: 
There was an incident in your production environment where the user data stored in the S3 bucket has been accidentally deleted by one of the Junior DevOps Engineers. The issue was escalated to your manager and after a few days, you were instructed to improve the security and protection of your AWS resources.   
What combination of the following options will protect the S3 objects in your bucket from both accidental deletion and overwriting? (Select TWO.)

A. Enable Versioning
B. Enable Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
C. Provide access to S3 data strictly through pre-signed URL only
D. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication Delete
E. Disallow S3 Delete using an IAM bucket policy

Correct Answer: B,D

Question 5:
A popular social media website uses a CloudFront web distribution to serve their static contents to their millions of users around the globe. They are receiving a number of complaints recently that their users take a lot of time to log into their website. There are also occasions when their users are getting HTTP 504 errors. You are instructed by your manager to significantly reduce the user’s login time to further optimize the system.
Which of the following options should you use together to set up a cost-effective solution that can improve your application’s performance? (Select TWO.)

A. Customize the content that the CloudFront web distribution delivers to your users using Lambda@Edge, which allows your Lambda functions to execute the authentication process in AWS locations closer to the users.
B. Deploy your application to multiple AWS regions to accommodate your users around the world. Set up a Route 53 record with latency routing policy to route incoming traffic to the region that provides the best latency to the user.
C. Configure your origin to add a Cache-Control max-age directive to your objects, and specify the longest practical value for max-age to increase the cache hit ratio of your CloudFront distribution.
D. Set up an origin failover by creating an origin group with two origins. Specify one as the primary origin and the other as the second origin which CloudFront automatically switches to when the primary origin returns specific HTTP status code failure responses.
E. Use multiple and geographically disperse VPCs to various AWS regions then create a transit VPC to connect all of your resources. In order to handle the requests faster, set up Lambda functions in each region using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) service.

Correct Answer: A,D

Question 6: 
A company is using Amazon S3 to store frequently accessed data. When an object is created or deleted, the S3 bucket will send an event notification to the Amazon SQS queue. A solutions architect needs to create a solution that will notify the development and operations team about the created or deleted objects.
Which of the following would satisfy this requirement?

A. Create a new Amazon SNS FIFO topic for the other team. Grant Amazon S3 permission to send the notification to the second SNS topic.
B. Set up another Amazon SQS queue for the other team. Grant Amazon S3 permission to send a notification to the second SQS queue.
C. Set up an Amazon SNS topic and configure two Amazon SQS queues to poll the SNS topic. Grant Amazon S3 permission to send notifications to Amazon SNS and update the bucket to use the new SNS topic.
D. Create an Amazon SNS topic and configure two Amazon SQS queues to subscribe to the topic. Grant Amazon S3 permission to send notifications to Amazon SNS and update the bucket to use the new SNS topic.

Correct Answer: D

Appendix
Which key tools, technologies, and concepts might be covered on the exam?
The following is a non-exhaustive list of the tools and technologies that could appear on the exam. This list is subject to change and is provided to help you understand the general scope of services, features, or technologies on the exam. The general tools and technologies in this list appear in no particular order. AWS services are grouped according to their primary functions. While some of these technologies will likely be covered more than others on the exam, the order and placement of them in this list is no indication of relative weight or importance:

• Compute
• Cost management
• Database
• Disaster recovery
• High performance
• Management and governance
• Microservices and component decoupling
• Migration and data transfer
• Networking, connectivity, and content delivery
• Resiliency
• Security
• Serverless and event-driven design principles
• Storage

AWS services and features
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