AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)
exam objectives

102 practice questions in this domain

• 1.1Design secure access to AWS resources (IAM users/groups/roles/policies, MFA, role-based access control, AWS STS and role switching, cross-account access, multi-account strategy via AWS Control Tower and service control policies [SCPs], resource policies, federating a directory service with IAM roles, the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS global infrastructure)
• 1.2Design secure workloads and applications (VPC security components: security groups, route tables, network ACLs, NAT gateways; public vs. private subnet segmentation; AWS Shield, AWS WAF, IAM Identity Center, AWS Secrets Manager; securing connections via VPN and AWS Direct Connect; Amazon Cognito, AWS GuardDuty, Amazon Macie; external threat vectors like DDoS and SQL injection)
• 1.3Determine appropriate data security controls (encrypting data at rest with AWS KMS and in transit with AWS Certificate Manager/TLS, encryption key access policies and rotation, certificate renewal, data backups and replication, data access/lifecycle/retention/classification policies, aligning AWS technologies to compliance requirements)

89 practice questions in this domain

• 2.1Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures (Amazon API Gateway/REST APIs, AWS managed services like Amazon SQS and AWS Transfer Family, caching strategies, microservices design principles including stateless vs. stateful workloads, event-driven architectures, horizontal vs. vertical scaling, edge accelerators/CDNs, migrating applications into containers, Application Load Balancer, multi-tier architectures, publish/subscribe queuing and messaging, serverless technologies like AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda, object/file/block storage types, container orchestration via Amazon ECS/EKS, read replicas, AWS Step Functions workflow orchestration)
• 2.2Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures (AWS global infrastructure including Availability Zones, AWS Regions, and Amazon Route 53; disaster recovery strategies -- backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active failover, RPO/RTO; distributed design patterns; failover strategies; immutable infrastructure; Amazon RDS Proxy; service quotas and throttling; storage durability and replication; AWS X-Ray workload visibility; mitigating single points of failure)

81 practice questions in this domain

• 3.1Determine high-performing and/or scalable storage solutions (Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, Amazon EBS, hybrid storage solutions, object/file/block storage types and their performance characteristics, storage services that scale to accommodate future needs)
• 3.2Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions (AWS compute services like AWS Batch, Amazon EMR, and AWS Fargate; distributed computing supported by AWS global infrastructure; Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS Auto Scaling; serverless patterns via AWS Lambda; container orchestration via Amazon ECS/EKS; decoupling workloads for independent scaling; selecting appropriate EC2 instance types and Lambda memory sizing)
• 3.3Determine high-performing database solutions (Amazon ElastiCache caching strategies, read-intensive vs. write-intensive data access patterns, database capacity planning including Provisioned IOPS, database connections and proxies, homogeneous vs. heterogeneous migrations, read replicas, relational vs. non-relational vs. in-memory database types, choosing between MySQL and PostgreSQL engines, Amazon Aurora vs. Amazon DynamoDB)
• 3.4Determine high-performing and/or scalable network architectures (edge networking services like Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator, network architecture design including subnet tiers/routing/IP addressing, Application Load Balancer, network connection options like AWS VPN/Direct Connect/PrivateLink, creating network topologies for global/hybrid/multi-tier architectures, appropriate resource placement)
• 3.5Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions (data analytics/visualization services like Amazon Athena and AWS Lake Formation, data ingestion frequency patterns, data transfer services like AWS DataSync and AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Glue data transformation, secure access to ingestion access points, streaming data via Amazon Kinesis, building and securing data lakes, transforming data between formats like .csv to .parquet)

68 practice questions in this domain

• 4.1Design cost-optimized storage solutions (S3 Requester Pays access, AWS cost management service features like cost allocation tags, AWS Cost Explorer/Budgets/Cost and Usage Report, storage services like Amazon FSx/EFS/S3/EBS, backup strategies, HDD vs. SSD block storage volume types, data lifecycles, hybrid storage options, S3 object lifecycle management, storage tiering, selecting the most cost-effective storage service for a workload)
• 4.2Design cost-optimized compute solutions (AWS purchasing options like Spot Instances/Reserved Instances/Savings Plans, distributed and hybrid compute strategies like AWS Outposts, instance types/families/sizes, optimizing compute utilization via containers/serverless/microservices, scaling strategies including EC2 hibernation, Application vs. Network vs. Gateway Load Balancer, availability requirements for production vs. non-production workloads)
• 4.3Design cost-optimized database solutions (caching strategies, data retention policies, database capacity planning, database connections and proxies, homogeneous vs. heterogeneous migrations, read replicas, relational vs. non-relational database types, DynamoDB vs. Amazon RDS cost-effectiveness, serverless database options, appropriate backup and retention/snapshot frequency policies)
• 4.4Design cost-optimized network architectures (NAT instance vs. NAT gateway costs, network connectivity options like private lines/dedicated lines/VPNs, network routing/topology/peering via AWS Transit Gateway and VPC peering, DNS and other network services, configuring routes to minimize network transfer costs, content delivery network and edge caching strategy, throttling strategy, bandwidth allocation for network devices)