AWS SAA-C03 Certification Exam

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certification validates the ability to design solutions on AWS that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized. The exam covers four domains: Design Secure Architectures, Design Resilient Architectures, Design High-Performing Architectures, and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures. It draws on services such as EC2, S3, VPC, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Lambda, ELB, Auto Scaling, CloudFront, Route 53, IAM, and KMS, and on the AWS Well-Architected Framework as the basis for choosing between them. Candidates are tested on selecting and combining services to meet stated requirements rather than on implementation detail. This certification suits solutions architects and developers with about a year of hands-on AWS design experience.

Certification Overview

  • Exam name: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)
  • Vendor: AWS
  • Exam code: SAA-C03
  • Duration: 130 minutes
  • Total questions: 65
  • Passing score: 72%

Who Should Take This Exam?

Solutions Architect, Cloud Architect, Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Systems Engineer, Software Developer, Technical Lead, Pre-Sales Solutions Consultant

Prerequisites

No prior certification is required. AWS recommends about one year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS.

Topics Covered

  • Design Secure Architectures
  • Design Resilient Architectures
  • Design High-Performing Architectures
  • Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

Question Types

  • Multiple Choice (Single Answer)
  • Multiple Choice (Multiple Answers)

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) Practice Questions

Our question bank contains 823+ practice questions for this certification. Sample questions from each exam chapter. Expand a question to see the answer choices. With a subscription, you get unlimited practice exams with randomized questions from our full question bank.

Design Secure Architectures

A newly created IAM user has no policies attached. What level of access does that user have?
  • Read-only access to all AWS services in the account
  • Console sign-in only, no programmatic API rights
  • Full administrator access to all AWS services
  • Zero permissions — IAM enforces deny by default
Which AWS service inspects HTTP and HTTPS requests and filters them based on rules at the application layer?
  • AWS WAF
  • Amazon GuardDuty
  • AWS Shield Advanced
  • AWS Network Firewall
Which encryption algorithm does S3 use when server-side encryption with S3-managed keys (SSE-S3) is enabled?
  • AES-256
  • Triple DES
  • RSA-2048
  • AES-128

Design Resilient Architectures

What is the primary benefit of using an Amazon SQS queue between an application tier and a processing tier?
  • It automatically encrypts messages in transit
  • It synchronizes both tiers to prevent duplicate processing
  • It stores messages across multiple Regions for durability
  • It lets each tier scale independently by decoupling them
An Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment automatically fails over to the standby when the primary becomes unavailable. What is the standby instance's role during normal operation?
  • The standby serves read traffic to offload the primary
  • It receives synchronous replication but serves no traffic
  • The standby handles scheduled analytics queries
  • It replays the primary binlog asynchronously, about 1s behind
How many Availability Zones does Amazon S3 replicate an object across by default?
  • 1 AZ, until cross-region replication is configured
  • Every AZ in the Region to reach 11 nines durability
  • At least 3 AZs within the same Region
  • 2 AZs: a primary copy and one backup

Design High-Performing Architectures

Which Amazon S3 storage class is designed for frequently accessed data that requires millisecond retrieval and the highest durability?
  • S3 Standard
  • S3 Intelligent-Tiering
  • S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)
  • S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access
What is the minimum object size for which Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) charges apply?
  • 64 KB
  • 1 MB
  • 256 KB
  • 128 KB
Which Amazon EFS throughput mode delivers throughput proportional to the amount of data stored in the file system?
  • Elastic Throughput mode
  • Provisioned Throughput mode
  • Bursting Throughput mode
  • Enhanced Throughput mode

Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

Which S3 storage class is designed for data that is accessed less than once per month and can tolerate a retrieval time of a few minutes?
  • S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
  • S3 Standard
  • S3 Intelligent-Tiering
  • S3 Standard-IA
Which EC2 purchasing option provides the largest discount compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for a commitment to a specific instance type in a specific region for a 1- or 3-year term?
  • Spot Instances
  • On-Demand Instances
  • Standard Reserved Instances
  • Dedicated Hosts
Which RDS feature automatically pauses the database cluster and stops billing for compute when there are no connections for a configurable period, reducing cost for intermittently used databases?
  • Aurora Multi-AZ with automatic failover
  • RDS Multi-AZ standby instance
  • Aurora Serverless v1 with automatic pause after a defined idle period
  • Aurora Serverless v2 with auto-pause on inactivity

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions are on the exam?

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) exam contains 65 questions.

What is the passing score?

You need 72% to pass.

How long is the exam?

You have 130 minutes to complete the exam.

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