About This Certification

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) validates the ability to design and implement distributed systems on AWS. It demonstrates competency in designing resilient, high-performing, secure, and cost-optimized architectures using AWS core services including compute, storage, databases, networking, and security.

Exam Overview

The SAA-C03 exam consists of 65 questions (scored and unscored) with a 130-minute time limit. Question types include multiple-choice and multiple-response. The exam is delivered at Pearson VUE and PSI testing centers or online via remote proctoring. A minimum score of 720/1000 is required to pass.

Exam Domains & Weighting

Domain	Description	Weight
Design Secure Architectures	IAM, AWS Organizations, SCP, VPC security, encryption, and secure application access patterns	30.0%
Design Resilient Architectures	High availability, fault tolerance, Auto Scaling, multi-AZ/multi-region, disaster recovery, and decoupled architectures	26.0%
Design High-Performing Architectures	Compute optimization (EC2, Lambda, containers), storage (S3, EFS, EBS), caching, and database selection	24.0%
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures	Reserved/Spot instances, S3 storage tiers, rightsizing, cost allocation, and cost-monitoring tools	20.0%