The AWS Solutions Architect - Associate exam is a certification exam for IT professionals who want to demonstrate their expertise in AWS architecture and best practices.
It is a challenging exam that tests the knowledge and skills required to design and deploy scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant systems on AWS.
Overview
Cloud computing is a rapidly growing industry, and AWS is the leading provider of cloud services. Building a career in cloud computing can be challenging, but it can also be very rewarding.
The AWS Solutions Architect - Associate exam covers a wide range of cloud computing topics related to the AWS well-architected framework.
There are many benefits to becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate, including increased job opportunities and greater earning potential.
Exam Format
- Questions : 65 multiple-choice and multiple-response
- Exam duration : 2 hours 10 minutes
- Passing score : 720 out of 1000 points
Topics Covered
Secure Architecture
- Identity and access management (IAM) for secure access to AWS resources
- Network security with VPCs, security groups, ACLs
- Data encryption at rest with KMS and in transit with TLS/SSL
- Leveraging AWS security services like GuardDuty and Macie
Resilient Architectures
- Scalability with auto scaling, load balancing, and microservices
- High availability across regions and zones
- Disaster recovery and backup strategies
- Serverless and container technologies like Lambda and ECS
High-Performance Solutions
- Database services like RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache
- Compute services like EC2, Lambda, Fargate
- Storage services like S3, EFS, EBS
- Networking with VPC, Direct Connect, API Gateway
- Analytics services like Kinesis, Athena, QuickSight
Cost Optimization
- Storage tiering, lifecycles, and backup strategies
- Compute purchasing options like spot, reserved instances
- Database caching, replication, scaling
- Network architecture with NAT gateways, peering
- AWS Cost Management tools like Cost Explorer
How to Prepare for the Exam
To pass the exam, candidates must have a strong understanding of these topics and be able to apply them to real-world scenarios. The best way to prepare for the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate exam is to gain hands-on experience with AWS services.
There are many resources available, including online courses, books, and tutorials. Taking practice exams will help you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and to get used to the format of the exam.
Resources
Books
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate (SAA-C03) Exam, 4th Edition (2022) by Ben Piper and David Clinton
- AWS for Solutions Architects: Design your cloud infrastructure by implementing DevOps, containers, and Amazon Web Services (2023) by Saurabh Shrivastava, Neelanjali Srivastav, and Alberto Artasanchez
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect’s Handbook: Kick-start your solutions architect career by learning architecture design principles and strategies (2022) by Saurabh Shrivastava and Neelanjali Srivastav
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) Cert Guide, 2nd Edition (2023) by Mark Wilkins
Courses
- Exam Prep Standard Course: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) by Amazon Web Services
- Exam Prep Enhanced Course: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) by Amazon Web Services
- Exam Prep Official Practice Question Set: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03 - English) by Amazon Web Services
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) by A Cloud Guru
- Prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) Certification by LinkedIn Learning
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) Bootcamp by O’Reilly Media
Podcasts
Code Repositories
- Notes for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate by Sumit Ghosh
- AWS Solution Architect Study Notes by Dave McCollough
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate by Stephen Sennett
- AWS Well-Architected Tool by Amazon Web Services
Sample Questions
- A company is running a web application on Amazon EC2 instances.
The company wants to implement a highly available solution that can withstand the failure of a single EC2 instance.
What is the most cost-effective solution to meet this requirement?
- A. Deploy the web application on an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group.
- B. Deploy the web application on an Amazon EC2 instance in a VPC with multiple Availability Zones.
- C. Deploy the web application on an Amazon EC2 instance in a VPC with a single Availability Zone.
- D. Deploy the web application on an Amazon RDS database instance.
- A company is planning to migrate its on-premises database to Amazon RDS.
The database contains sensitive customer data, so the company needs to ensure that the data is encrypted at rest.
Which encryption option should the company use?
- A. Amazon RDS managed encryption keys (SSE-S3)
- B. AWS KMS managed encryption keys (SSE-KMS)
- C. Customer-provided encryption keys (SSE-C)
- D. Client-side encryption
- A company is running a website on Amazon S3.
The website uses a custom domain name that is managed by a third-party domain registrar.
The company wants to implement a solution to ensure that the website is always available, even if the third-party domain registrar becomes unavailable.
What is the most effective solution to meet this requirement?
- A. Use Amazon Route 53 to create a hosted zone for the domain name.
- B. Use Amazon CloudFront to create a distribution for the website.
- C. Use Amazon Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic to the website.
- D. Use Amazon S3 website hosting to publish the website.