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.

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

Analytics:

• Amazon Athena
• AWS Data Exchange
• AWS Data Pipeline
• Amazon EMR
• AWS Glue
• Amazon Kinesis
• AWS Lake Formation
• Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
• Amazon OpenSearch Service (Amazon Elasticsearch Service)
• Amazon QuickSight
• Amazon Redshift

Application Integration:

• Amazon AppFlow
• AWS AppSync
• Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events)
• Amazon MQ
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
• AWS Step Functions

AWS Cost Management:

• AWS Budgets
• AWS Cost and Usage Report
• AWS Cost Explorer
• Savings Plans

Compute:

• AWS Batch
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• AWS Outposts
• AWS Serverless Application Repository
• VMware Cloud on AWS
• AWS Wavelength

Containers:

• Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
• Amazon ECS Anywhere
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
• Amazon EKS Anywhere
• Amazon EKS Distro

Database:

• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon Aurora Serverless
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon ElastiCache
• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
• Amazon Neptune
• Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB)
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon Timestream

Developer Tools:

• AWS X-Ray

Front-End Web and Mobile:

• AWS Amplify
• Amazon API Gateway
• AWS Device Farm
• Amazon Pinpoint

Machine Learning:

• Amazon Comprehend
• Amazon Forecast
• Amazon Fraud Detector
• Amazon Kendra
• Amazon Lex
• Amazon Polly
• Amazon Rekognition
• Amazon SageMaker
• Amazon Textract
• Amazon Transcribe
• Amazon Translate

Management and Governance:

• AWS Auto Scaling
• AWS CloudFormation
• AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)
• AWS Compute Optimizer
• AWS Config
• AWS Control Tower
• AWS License Manager
• Amazon Managed Grafana
• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
• AWS Management Console
• AWS Organizations
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard
• AWS Proton
• AWS Service Catalog
• AWS Systems Manager
• AWS Trusted Advisor
• AWS Well-Architected Tool

Media Services:

• Amazon Elastic Transcoder
• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams

Migration and Transfer:

• AWS Application Discovery Service
• AWS Application Migration Service (CloudEndure Migration)
• AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
• AWS DataSync
• AWS Migration Hub
• AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS)
• AWS Snow Family
• AWS Transfer Family

Networking and Content Delivery:

• Amazon CloudFront
• AWS Direct Connect
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
• AWS Global Accelerator
• AWS PrivateLink
• Amazon Route 53
• AWS Transit Gateway
• Amazon VPC
• AWS VPN

Security, Identity, and Compliance:

• AWS Artifact
• AWS Audit Manager
• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
• AWS CloudHSM
• Amazon Cognito
• Amazon Detective
• AWS Directory Service
• AWS Firewall Manager
• Amazon GuardDuty
• AWS Identity and Access Management(IAM)
• Amazon Inspector
• AWS Key Management Service (AWSKMS)
• Amazon Macie
• AWS Network Firewall
• AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM)
• AWS Secrets Manager
• AWS Security Hub
• AWS Shield
• AWS Single Sign-On
• AWS WAF

Serverless:

• AWS AppSync
• AWS Fargate
• AWS Lambda

Storage:

• AWS Backup
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• Amazon FSx (for all types)
• Amazon S3
• Amazon S3 Glacier
• AWS Storage Gateway

Out-of-scope AWS services and features

The following is a non-exhaustive list of AWS services and features that are not covered on the exam. These services and features do not represent every AWS offering that is excluded from the exam content.

Analytics:

• Amazon CloudSearch

Application Integration:

• Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA)

AR and VR:

• Amazon Sumerian

Blockchain:

• Amazon Managed Blockchain

Compute:

• Amazon Lightsail

Database:

• Amazon RDS on VMware

Developer Tools:

• AWS Cloud9
• AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)
• AWS CloudShell
• AWS CodeArtifact
• AWS CodeBuild
• AWS CodeCommit
• AWS CodeDeploy
• Amazon CodeGuru
• AWS CodeStar
• Amazon Corretto
• AWS Fault Injection Simulator (AWS FIS)
• AWS Tools and SDKs

Front-End Web and Mobile:

• Amazon Location Service

Game Tech:

• Amazon GameLift
• Amazon Lumberyard

Internet of Things:

• All services

Machine Learning:

• Apache MXNet on AWS
• Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I)
• AWS DeepComposer
• AWS Deep Learning AMIs (DLAMI)
• AWS Deep Learning Containers
• AWS DeepLens
• AWS DeepRacer
• Amazon DevOps Guru
• Amazon Elastic Inference
• Amazon HealthLake
• AWS Inferentia
• Amazon Lookout for Equipment
• Amazon Lookout for Metrics
• Amazon Lookout for Vision
• Amazon Monitron
• AWS Panorama
• Amazon Personalize
• PyTorch on AWS
• Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler
• Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth
• TensorFlow on AWS

Management and Governance:

• AWS Chatbot
• AWS Console Mobile Application
• AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
• AWS OpsWorks

Media Services:

• AWS Elemental Appliances and Software
• AWS Elemental MediaConnect
• AWS Elemental MediaConvert
• AWS Elemental MediaLive
• AWS Elemental MediaPackage
• AWS Elemental MediaStore
• AWS ElementalMediaTailor
• Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS)

Migration and Transfer:

• Migration Evaluator (formerly TSO Logic)

Networking and Content Delivery:

• AWS App Mesh
• AWS Cloud Map

Quantum Technologies:

• Amazon Braket

Robotics:

• AWS RoboMaker

Satellite:

• AWS Ground Station