Servisphere

SAA-C03 study guide

13 topic modules with key points, diagrams drawn with the official AWS icons, comparison tables, exam scenarios and pitfalls.

Exam format

  • Questions65 (50 scored)
  • Time130 minutes
  • Passing score720 / 100–1000

The 4 exam domains

  • Secure architectures30%
  • Resilient architectures26%
  • High-performing architectures24%
  • Cost-optimized architectures20%

Official exam guide ↗

Modules

  1. 01AWS fundamentals: global infrastructure and Well-ArchitectedRegion, Availability Zone, edge location, the shared responsibility model and the 6 Well-Architected pillars: the framework for reading every architecture question.
  2. 02IAM and access managementUsers, groups, roles, policies, how AWS evaluates permissions, temporary credentials via STS, multiple accounts with Organizations and IAM Identity Center.
  3. 03Compute: EC2, Auto Scaling, Lambda, containersChoosing EC2 instance types and purchase options, automatic scaling, serverless with Lambda, and containers on ECS / EKS / Fargate.
  4. 04Storage: S3, EBS, EFS, FSxS3 storage classes and lifecycle, encryption and Object Lock, EBS block volumes, EFS / FSx file systems, hybrid storage with Storage Gateway, and centralized backup with AWS Backup.
  5. 05DatabasesRDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache and purpose-built databases: choose by data model, availability and performance.
  6. 06Networking and content deliveryVPC, subnets, route tables, Security Group / NACL, NAT, endpoints, connecting VPCs to each other and to on-prem, Route 53, CloudFront, Global Accelerator.
  7. 07Security and encryptionEncryption with KMS / CloudHSM, secrets management, certificates, web protection (WAF, Shield), threat detection and compliance.
  8. 08Application integration and decouplingSQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, API Gateway: decouple to absorb load, tolerate failures and scale independently.
  9. 09Monitoring, operations and infrastructure as codeCloudWatch, CloudTrail, Config, Systems Manager, CloudFormation: observability, audit trails, operations automation.
  10. 10Migration and data transferThe 7R strategies, Application Migration Service, DMS, DataSync, Transfer Family, Storage Gateway, Snow Family: bringing servers, databases and data to AWS.
  11. 11Data analyticsKinesis, Firehose, Glue, Athena, EMR, Redshift, Lake Formation, OpenSearch: collecting, processing and querying big data.
  12. 12Architecture patterns: high availability, disaster recovery, decouplingMulti-AZ, multi-Region, 4 DR strategies by RTO / RPO, serverless and event-driven architecture, multi-layer caching.
  13. 13Cost optimizationHow to buy EC2 (On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved, Spot), cheap storage classes, data transfer costs and cost monitoring tools.

Topic list inspired by the structure of ChathurangaVKD/AWS-Certified-Solutions-Architect-Associate-SAA-C03 (MIT). Content, diagrams and scenarios are written by Servisphere and checked against AWS documentation.

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