#saa-c03

Another weekend staring at flashcards. Sound familiar?

If you're prepping for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate, you've probably seen the recommendations: buy Boson ($300), buy Tutorials Dojo ($15-40), buy this, buy that. Everyone's selling you something. So let me be the voice of reason for five minutes.

The SAA-C03 Is Not That Hard

I know people build it up like it's some impossible gauntlet. It's not. It's 65 questions in 130 minutes about designing stuff on AWS. If you've worked with AWS for 6+ months, you already know 40% of the material. The other 60% is learning AWS's specific way of solving common problems.

The pass score is 720 out of 1000. That's roughly 70%. You can get 20 questions wrong and still pass.

What It Actually Tests

Four domains:

Design Secure Architectures (30%) — IAM policies, encryption at rest/in transit, VPC security groups vs NACLs

Design Resilient Architectures (26%) — Multi-AZ deployments, Auto Scaling, ELB, Route 53 failover

Design High-Performing Architectures (24%) — CloudFront, ElastiCache, choosing the right database, S3 storage classes

Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%) — Reserved vs Spot vs On-Demand, S3 lifecycle policies, right-sizing

The Study Resources Scam

The best resources for the SAA-C03 are either free or dirt cheap.

Free: AWS Skill Builder, AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepapers, r/AWSCertifications on Reddit

Dirt cheap: ExamCert's AWS SAA-C03 practice tests — $4.99 lifetime. Not per month. Lifetime access to 30,000+ questions. Money-back guarantee.

Three Things That Trip Everyone Up

1. S3 Storage Classes. Standard, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant, Glacier Flexible, Glacier Deep Archive, Intelligent-Tiering. Know the retrieval times and costs.

2. Database Selection. RDS vs DynamoDB vs Aurora vs Redshift vs ElastiCache. Each has a specific use case.

3. VPC Networking. Public vs private subnets, NAT Gateway, Internet Gateway, VPC Peering vs Transit Gateway.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes << Go to Question 1 Go to Question 3 >> AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams-1-Question-2 As you are in the practice mode so, no time restrictions, no scoring. We suggest you to – – Read the question carefully.– Identify and focus on key-words.– Apply design thinking.– Identify and ignore options which are just distractors. Let’s…

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams-1-Question-1 As you are in the practice mode so, no time restrictions, no scoring. We suggest you to – – Read the question carefully.– Identify and focus on key-words.– Apply design thinking.– Identify and ignore options which are just distractors. Let’s resolve the following question, Good…