Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) + Exam

Core Topics

• Cloud computing concepts: on-demand delivery, pay-as-you-go pricing

• AWS global infrastructure: Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations

• AWS shared responsibility model

• Overview of core AWS services and support plans

Core Topics

• VPC architecture and components: subnets, route tables, Internet Gateway

• Security Groups and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs)

• VPC peering, Transit Gateway, Site-to-Site VPN, and AWS Direct Connect

• NAT Gateway, Elastic IP, and VPC Endpoints

Core Topics

• IAM users, groups, roles, and permission policies

• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and password policies

• AWS Organizations and Service Control Policies (SCPs)

• Identity federation, AWS IAM Identity Center, and cross-account access

Core Topics

• Amazon S3: storage classes, versioning, lifecycle policies, and cross-region replication

• Amazon EBS: volume types, snapshots, and encryption

• Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx for shared file storage

• AWS Storage Gateway and Snow Family for hybrid and edge storage

Core Topics

• Amazon Route 53: routing policies (weighted, latency, failover, geolocation) and health checks

• Elastic Load Balancing: Application, Network, and Gateway Load Balancers

• Amazon CloudFront: CDN, edge caching, and signed URLs

• AWS Global Accelerator for global performance optimization

Core Topics

• Amazon RDS and Aurora: Multi-AZ, read replicas, and automated backups

• Amazon DynamoDB: provisioned vs. on-demand capacity, DAX, and global tables

• Amazon Redshift, Athena, and AWS Glue for data warehousing and ETL

• Amazon Kinesis and EMR for real-time streaming and big data processing

Core Topics

• AWS migration strategies: the 7 Rs (Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, etc.)

• AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) and Schema Conversion Tool (SCT)

• AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) for lift-and-shift

• AWS DataSync and Transfer Family for data movement to AWS

Core Topics

• AWS Lambda: triggers, event sources, concurrency, and execution models

• Amazon SQS and SNS for message queuing and pub/sub patterns

• Amazon API Gateway for building RESTful and WebSocket APIs

• AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge for workflow orchestration

Core Topics

• AWS KMS and CloudHSM for key management and encryption

• AWS WAF, AWS Shield, and Amazon GuardDuty for threat detection

• Amazon Macie for S3 data discovery and AWS Security Hub for centralized findings

• AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config for audit, compliance, and governance

Core Topics

• Amazon CloudWatch: metrics, alarms, dashboards, and log insights

• AWS CloudFormation and AWS Systems Manager for infrastructure automation

• AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer for optimization recommendations

• AWS Auto Scaling groups and lifecycle hooks

Core Topics

• Applying IAM least-privilege principles across accounts and services

• Securing data at rest (KMS encryption) and in transit (TLS/SSL)

• Designing secure network boundaries with private subnets and VPC endpoints

• Implementing detective controls: GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail

Core Topics

• Multi-AZ and Multi-Region deployment patterns for high availability

• Disaster recovery strategies: Backup & Restore, Pilot Light, Warm Standby, Active-Active

• Auto Scaling and fault-tolerant design with health checks

• Decoupling applications using SQS, SNS, and Event-Driven architectures

Core Topics

• Selecting performant compute: EC2 instance families, Lambda, and Fargate

• Caching strategies with Amazon ElastiCache and CloudFront

• Storage performance: EBS volume types, S3 Transfer Acceleration

• Database read scaling with read replicas, DynamoDB DAX, and query optimization

Core Topics

• EC2 pricing models: On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances

• S3 Intelligent-Tiering and lifecycle rules to minimize storage costs

• Right-sizing resources with AWS Compute Optimizer and Cost Explorer

• Serverless and managed services to reduce operational overhead and cost

Core Topics

• AWS Skill Builder platform: accessing official exam prep courses

• Official AWS SAA-C03 practice question sets and sample exams

• Exam readiness paths and topic-specific mini assessments

• Strategies for approaching scenario-based exam questions