Certification Overview
SAA (Certified Solutions Architect – Associate) is one of AWS’s official certifications. It validates the ability to appropriately select and combine AWS solution services for building and operating systems. Among AWS certifications, SAA is one of the most popular and is often the first certification engineers aim to acquire to demonstrate their AWS skills.
The validity period for SAA is three years. Before your certification expires, passing the latest version of the exam again—or passing the higher-level SAP (Certified Solutions Architect – Professional)—will renew your certification.
Exam Scope
The most recent version of the SAA exam is SAA-C03. Questions are drawn from four main domains.
1. Designing a Secure Architecture
- Designing Secure Access
- Account management and access restrictions
- Concepts like Regions and Availability Zones
- Security best practices
- Designing Secure Workloads and Applications
- Protecting applications and networks
- Defending against external threats
- Proper use of security services
- Designing Data Security
- Data access and governance management
- Data protection
- Data encryption
2. Designing a Scalable and Resilient Architecture
- Designing for Scalability and Loose Coupling
- API management, leveraging managed services like SQS, vertical/horizontal scaling
- Container and serverless architectures
- Microservices design and event-driven architectures
- Various storage options
- Designing for High Availability
- Regions and Availability Zones
- Backups, failover, RPO/RTO
- Distributed design and load balancing
3. Designing a High-Performance Architecture
- High-Performance, Scalable Storage
- S3, EFS, EBS
- Availability and scalability
- High-Performance, Elastic Compute
- Auto Scaling, Fargate, Lambda, ECS, EKS
- Asynchronous processing with SQS
- High-Performance Databases
- RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache
- Multi-AZ, Multi-Region, read replicas
- High-Performance, Scalable Networking
- CloudFront, Global Accelerator
- VPN, Direct Connect, PrivateLink
- ALB, NLB
- High-Performance Data Ingestion and Processing
- S3, Athena, QuickSight
- Kinesis, DataSync, Glue, EMR
4. Cost Optimization
- Cost Optimization for Storage
- S3 lifecycle management and access options
- HDD vs. SSD, EFS vs. FSx
- Hybrid environments via DataSync or Storage Gateway
- Cost Optimization for Compute
- Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, and Savings Plans
- Auto Scaling and choosing optimal instance types
- Cost Optimization for Databases
- Caching and read replicas
- Data retention policies and snapshots
- Cost Optimization for Networking
- Choosing NAT Gateways, VPC endpoints, Direct Connect, or VPN
- Using CDNs and edge caching
- Optimizing inter-region data transfer
Exam Details
The exam consists of 65 questions in total, with 50 questions that count toward your score and 15 unscored items. The scoring is out of 1,000 points, and the passing score is 720 points.
Questions are multiple-choice, with two formats: select 1 answer from 4 choices, or select 2 or more answers from 5 or more choices. Some questions can be up to about 500 words long, so simply reading the question and answer choices can take considerable time. It’s crucial to get familiar with the exam format by practicing with sample questions.
Recommended Study Time
| Suggested Study Period | Study Methods | |
|---|---|---|
| No AWS experience | Around 3 months | Books Online Courses Online Practice Questions |
| Some AWS learning experience | Around 1 month | Online Courses Online Practice Questions |
| Using AWS at work already | About 2 weeks | Online Practice Questions |
If you are completely new to AWS and taking on the SAA exam for the first time, consider studying for about three months. Start by learning basic cloud concepts through reference books or online courses, then work through practice question sets repeatedly. You can also sign up for AWS and try services like EC2, S3, and Lambda to build a simple environment, giving you a practical overview of the platform. AWS’s free tier is helpful for efficient learning.
If you already have AWS learning experience or have obtained other AWS certifications, you may reach a passing level for SAA with about one month of focused study. If you find any gaps in your knowledge, quickly brush up with an online course, then reinforce by repeatedly solving practice questions until you feel confident.
If you already use AWS in your daily work and have sufficient knowledge, you might be able to pass the SAA exam after about two weeks of study. Work through practice questions repeatedly to prepare for the real exam.
Recommended Study Materials
On this site, we provide many practice questions for the AWS SAA exam. Keep practicing and get ready for the real exam!
- AWS SAA Free Practice Lite (1)
- AWS SAA Free Practice Lite (2)
- AWS SAA Free Practice (1) 30 questions, updated October 2024
- AWS SAA Free Practice (2) 30 questions, updated November 2024
- AWS SAA Free Practice (3) 30 questions, updated December 2024
We also recommend online courses on Udemy.
- Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2025
- Over 25 hours of video lectures
- 1 practice tests
- Highly popular course with over 1,000,000 students enrolled
- Practice Exams | AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
- 6 complete practice tests
Conclusion
This has been an overview of the AWS SAA exam. If you’re new to AWS, the amount of knowledge you need to learn can feel overwhelming at first, but with steady study, this certification is well within reach. By earning an AWS certification, you’ll not only gain foundational cloud knowledge but also demonstrate your capabilities as an engineer, opening up more career opportunities. Good luck with your studies!