If you are about to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) exam, the first thing worth doing is understanding the SAA-C03 syllabus in full. This guide is the complete AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Syllabus in one place: the four exam domains and their weightings, the exam format, and the top 15 topics you need to master before you sit the test. With steady preparation, this exam is very doable, and knowing exactly what it covers is where that preparation starts.
What Is the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) Exam?
At its core, this exam checks whether you can put cloud components together in a sensible, practical way. It is less about memorising every feature of every service and more about designing something that works under real conditions.
You will see questions about storage options, handling traffic spikes, improving security, or choosing a design that survives unexpected failures. These mirror the decisions real architects make when they build or migrate workloads. If you have ever wondered how cloud architects decide which service fits which situation, this exam is built around that thinking.
Is SAA-C03 the Current Version?
Yes. SAA-C03 is the current version of the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. The previous version, SAA-C02, retired on August 29, 2022, so there is no longer a choice to make between versions. If you are preparing today, you are preparing for SAA-C03, and the syllabus below reflects the current exam.
SAA-C03 Exam Format: Questions, Duration, and Scoring
Here is what the test itself looks like:
- 65 questions total, of which 50 count toward your score and 15 are unscored experimental questions you cannot identify during the exam.
- 130 minutes to complete it.
- A mix of multiple-choice (one correct answer) and multiple-response (two or more correct answers) questions.
- Scored on a scale of 100 to 1000, with 720 needed to pass.
The questions are mostly scenario-based. Rather than asking you to recall a definition, they describe a situation in a line or two and ask which design fits best. AWS uses the 15 unscored questions to trial ideas for future exams, and they do not affect your result.
The Four AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Domains and Their Weightings
The SAA-C03 exam splits into four domains. Each carries a different weight toward your score, and the SAA-C03 domain weightings tell you where to spend your study time.
| SAA-C03 Exam Domain | Weighting |
| Design Secure Architectures | 30% |
| Design Resilient Architectures | 26% |
| Design High-Performing Architectures | 24% |
| Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% |
Secure architectures carry the most weight, so security topics deserve the most attention. The subtopics under each domain, straight from the official exam guide, are listed further down.
What Skills the SAA-C03 Exam Tests
The AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam objectives come down to three practical skills:
- Designing systems that stay secure and reliable. Build something that keeps running even when a piece of it fails, and protect it with the right security layers.
- Choosing the right service for the job. Read a requirement and pick a solution that makes sense, one that will not crumble under load or cost a fortune.
- Giving solid design advice. Recommend best practices and suggest improvements across the life of a project, which is a large part of an architect’s real work.
Do You Need Any Prerequisites for the SAA-C03 Exam?
You do not need any earlier certification to sit SAA-C03. AWS suggests you have around a year of hands-on AWS experience, some background in traditional or on-prem IT, and a basic grasp of networking, storage, compute, and databases. If you are newer than that, do not worry. Good training material, hands-on labs, and consistent practice close the gap quickly.
The Top 15 SAA-C03 Exam Topics to Master
This is the heart of the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam syllabus. These are the top 15 SAA-C03 exam topics that come up most, mapped to the way the exam actually tests them.
Core Topics Covered in the SAA-C03 Exam
Topic 1 – Design Secure Architectures: IAM, Security Groups, KMS, and Encryption
Security is a major theme in the exam. You’ll see multiple questions about Identity and Access Management policies, roles, and permission boundaries. Also, understand how Security Groups and Network ACLs work in practice.
The Key Management Service (KMS) is frequently mentioned and mainly refers to encryption at rest and in transit, cross-account access, and key rotation. Be aware of how to encrypt S3 objects and EBS volumes, and the way KMS can be used along with Amazon RDS and Lambda.
Common Questions on AWS Security in SAA-C03 “A company needs to share encrypted data with another AWS account securely. Which services/features should they use?” Hint: KMS with cross-account access.
Topic 2 – Design Resilient Architectures: High Availability with ELB, Auto Scaling, and Route 53
Fault tolerance and high availability are a must to know. Knowing the difference between Multi-AZ and Multi-Region configurations is one of the questions that are being tested rather frequently during the exam. Make sure that you are very confident in designing architectures using Elastic Load Balancers, auto-scaling groups, and Route 53 failover policies in the most adequate way.
Real-World Scenarios Asked in the SAA-C03 Exam One scenario described a legacy app running in a single Amazon EC2 instance. How can availability be boosted with minimal change? Was the question. Learn the timing to introduce an ALB or to switch to managed services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk or ECS.
Topic 3 – Design High-Performing Architectures: Amazon EC2, EBS, S3 Performance Optimization
You’ll get questions that require you to optimize latency and throughput for EC2 and S3. An example could be learning the difference between the volumes in GP3 and IO2 and ways to improve the throughput of S3 by utilizing multipart uploads and Transfer Acceleration.
Tips for Solving Performance-Related Questions Focus on matching the workload to the right instance types and storage classes. Questions will often use phrasing like “a read-heavy application” or “bursty traffic”; recognize these as clues for selecting services like ElastiCache, Provisioned IOPS, or EFS.
Topic 4 – Design Cost-Optimized Architectures: Choosing Between On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances
Cost optimization isn’t just about choosing the cheapest option—it’s about picking the most appropriate pricing model for the use case. Know the differences between On-Demand, Reserved Instances (RI), and Spot Instances.
Using AWS Trusted Advisor for Cost Optimization Expect questions where AWS Trusted Advisor flags underutilized resources. You’ll need to identify next steps, terminating unused EC2s, resizing RDS, or setting up budget alerts in AWS Budgets.
Topic 5 – Understand Well-Architected Framework—Operational Excellence, Reliability, and Efficiency
I strongly advise going over the AWS Well-Architected Framework and the five pillars in particular. The queries can ask about the application of this principle, such as operational insights with CloudWatch Alarms or autoscaling as a means of reliability.
Topic 6 – Serverless Architectures with Lambda and API Gateway
Learn the communication with AWS Lambda and API Gateway, EventBridge, and Step Functions. You will likely encounter those situations when a serverless solution would be more desirable than a traditional EC2-based solution.
Topic 7 – Storage Solutions: S3, EBS, EFS, Glacier
Learn S3 storage classes (Standard, IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier, and Deep Archive) and how to use EBS or EFS. Questions were raised about lifecycle policies and what could be done to optimize archival storage.
Topic 8 – Networking and Content Delivery: VPC, CloudFront, Route 53
Learn about the basics of VPC subnets, route tables, NAT gateways, and peering. As well, you must be aware of how CloudFront accelerates the content and what the difference is between routing policies in Route 53 (latency routing, failover routing, and geolocation routing).
Topic 9 – Databases on AWS: RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora
Find out how to work with RDS, Amazon Aurora, and DynamoDB. Read how DAX or Global Tables can be used with DynamoDB and Aurora Serverless v2 features.
Topic 10 – Monitoring and Logging: CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Config
Know how to set AWS CloudWatch metrics, alarms, and dashboards, and how CloudTrail tracks API calls. Some of the questions included AWS Config and an audit of changes to resources over time.
Topic 11 – Disaster Recovery Strategies on AWS
You must know the difference between Backup & Restore, Pilot Light, Warm Standby, and Multi-Site Active-Active architectures. Real-world scenario questions tested RTO and RPO requirements.
Topic 12 – Hybrid Architectures and VPN/Direct Connect
Understand how VPN and AWS Direct Connect link on-premise data centers with AWS. I had a question on ensuring consistent latency for hybrid workloads—knowing when to use Direct Connect was key.
Topic 13 – Compute Options: EC2, ECS, Fargate, Lambda
The exam puts a lot of focus on use case-compute pairing. Understanding when to use ECS and EC2 and when to use Fargate, or the role of Lambda in an event-driven framework.
Topic 14 – Identity & Access Management Deep Dive
Beyond IAM basics, you’ll need to understand roles vs. policies, cross-account access, and federation with SAML or Cognito. Multi-factor authentication and service control policies in AWS Organizations also come up.
Topic 15 – Exam-Day Strategy and Sample Question Breakdown
There are tricky distractors in the exam; therefore, questions should be read carefully. Mark the ones that you are not sure of and review them. Questions are mostly situation-based and aim at testing judgment rather than memory.
Official Subtopics Under Each SAA-C03 Exam Domain
The 15 topics above map onto the official domain breakdown from the AWS exam guide:
Design Secure Architectures (30%): designing secure access to AWS resources, designing secure workloads and applications, determining appropriate data security controls.
Design Resilient Architectures (26%): designing scalable and loosely coupled architectures, designing highly available and fault-tolerant architectures.
Design High-Performing Architectures (24%): determining high-performing storage, compute, database, and network solutions, and high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions.
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%): designing cost-optimised storage, compute, database, and network solutions.
For official exam information and updates, refer to the Amazon AWS SAA-C03 exam page.
Where the Syllabus Points You Next
Knowing the syllabus is step one. Turning it into a study plan is step two, and that is a topic on its own. For a full walkthrough, see our guide on how to prepare for the SAA-C03 exam. In short, read the official exam page and exam guide, follow the AWS learning path, review the Well-Architected Framework whitepaper, take a structured course, and finish with practice tests.
The single topic most worth practising by hand is design under real conditions, which is why hands-on labs for SAA-C03 matter so much. And if you are weighing how tough the test really is, we break that down in how difficult the SAA-C03 exam is.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Don’t just cram theory; it might seem easy, but while taking the exam, you might have second thoughts about getting hands-on experience. Do not regret skipping those much-needed labs.
- Don’t overlook cost and security questions. They’re everywhere.
- Avoid tunnel vision. AWS loves scalable, managed solutions; do not limit yourself to a few favorite services of your own.
FAQs on the SAA-C03 Exam Syllabus
How many questions are in the SAA-C03 exam? 65 questions in total. 50 are scored and 15 are unscored. The count is fixed, unlike the adaptive format of some Azure certs.
What is the passing score for SAA-C03? The exam is scored from 100 to 1000, and you need 720 to pass.
Do I need coding skills to pass? Not really. Understanding JSON and the basics of Lambda helps, but you do not need to write production code.
Is the SAA-C03 exam hard? It is challenging but manageable with consistent preparation. We go deeper in our SAA-C03 exam difficulty guide.
Do I need earlier AWS certifications first? No. There are no required prerequisites, though about a year of hands-on experience is recommended.
Summary: The SAA-C03 Syllabus at a Glance
If you take one thing from this SAA-C03 syllabus, focus your study on the areas that carry weight and show up most:
- IAM, VPC, EC2, and S3 as the foundation
- Resilience with ELB and Auto Scaling
- Serverless options
- Cost-optimization pricing models
- The Well-Architected Framework
Knowing the full syllabus turns the exam from a guessing game into a plan. When you are ready to build that plan around structured practice, the Whizlabs AWS SAA-C03 course pairs video lessons, hands-on labs, and practice tests to cover everything above. Good luck with your prep.
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