Free AWS SAA-C03 Exam Questions

Core AWS Solutions Architect Technologies:

• Compute Services - Amazon EC2, EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, AWS Batch, Amazon EMR, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Outposts, VMware Cloud on AWS, AWS Wavelength
• Container Services - Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR, Amazon ECS Anywhere, Amazon EKS Anywhere, Amazon EKS Distro
• Storage Services - Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, Amazon FSx (all types), AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Backup, Amazon S3 Glacier
• Database Services - Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Aurora Serverless, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Keyspaces, Amazon Neptune, Amazon QLDB, Amazon Redshift
• Networking & Content Delivery - Amazon VPC, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, Elastic Load Balancing (ALB, NLB, GLB), AWS Direct Connect, AWS VPN, AWS PrivateLink, AWS Transit Gateway, Amazon Route 53, AWS Client VPN
• Security Services - AWS IAM, AWS IAM Identity Center (SSO), AWS KMS, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Cognito, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Macie, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, Amazon Inspector, AWS Network Firewall, AWS Firewall Manager, AWS Artifact, AWS Audit Manager, Amazon Detective, AWS CloudHSM, AWS Directory Service, AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM)
• Application Integration - Amazon API Gateway, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, AWS Step Functions, Amazon AppFlow, AWS AppSync, Amazon MQ
• Analytics Services - Amazon Athena, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon QuickSight, AWS Lake Formation, AWS Data Pipeline, AWS Data Exchange, Amazon MSK
• Management & Governance - AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Compute Optimizer, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Well-Architected Tool, AWS Service Catalog, AWS Proton, AWS License Manager, AWS Health Dashboard, Amazon Managed Grafana, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
• Migration & Transfer - AWS DMS, AWS DataSync, AWS Transfer Family, AWS Application Migration Service, AWS Application Discovery Service, AWS Migration Hub, AWS Snow Family
• Machine Learning - Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Forecast, Amazon Fraud Detector, Amazon Kendra, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate
• Cost Management - AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances

Exam Sections (4 Main Domains with Weightings):

1. Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures (30%) - Design secure access to AWS resources (IAM, IAM Identity Center, federated access, multi-account strategies, AWS Control Tower, SCPs, role-based access control, AWS STS, resource policies). Design secure workloads and applications (VPC architectures, security groups, network ACLs, NAT gateways, network segmentation, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, AWS Secrets Manager, VPN, Direct Connect). Determine appropriate data security controls (encryption at rest with KMS, encryption in transit with ACM/TLS, data access policies, data backups and replication, key rotation, certificate renewal, compliance requirements).
2. Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures (26%) - Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures (event-driven architectures, microservices, multi-tier architectures, API Gateway, REST APIs, caching strategies, horizontal/vertical scaling, edge accelerators/CDN, container migration, load balancing, queuing/messaging, serverless technologies, storage types, container orchestration, read replicas, workflow orchestration with Step Functions). Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures (AWS global infrastructure, Availability Zones, Regions, Route 53, disaster recovery strategies, RPO/RTO, backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active failover, distributed design patterns, failover strategies, immutable infrastructure, load balancing, RDS Proxy, service quotas, storage durability and replication, workload visibility with X-Ray).
3. Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures (24%) - Determine high-performing and/or scalable storage solutions (S3, EFS, EBS, hybrid storage, storage types and characteristics, performance demands, scalability). Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions (AWS Batch, EMR, Fargate, distributed computing, edge services, queuing/messaging, EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Auto Scaling, Lambda, Fargate, container orchestration, decoupling workloads, scaling metrics, EC2 instance types, Lambda memory configuration). Determine high-performing database solutions (Availability Zones, Regions, ElastiCache caching, read/write-intensive patterns, database capacity planning, Provisioned IOPS, database connections and proxies, database engines, read replicas, database architectures, Aurora, DynamoDB). Determine high-performing and/or scalable network architectures (CloudFront, Global Accelerator, network architecture design, subnet tiers, routing, IP addressing, load balancing, VPN, Direct Connect, PrivateLink, network topology, network scaling, resource placement, load balancing strategy). Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions (Athena, Lake Formation, QuickSight, data ingestion patterns, DataSync, Storage Gateway, AWS Glue, secure ingestion access points, Kinesis streaming, data lakes, data streaming architectures, data transfer solutions, visualization strategies, EMR compute options, data format transformation).
4. Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%) - Design cost-optimized storage solutions (S3 Requester Pays, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing, Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost and Usage Report, FSx, EFS, S3, EBS, backup strategies, data lifecycles, hybrid storage, storage tiering, storage access patterns, batch vs individual uploads, storage sizing, data transfer costs, storage auto scaling, S3 object lifecycles, backup/archival solutions, data migration services, storage tiers, data lifecycle management). Design cost-optimized compute solutions (cost allocation tags, multi-account billing, Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost and Usage Report, Availability Zones, Regions, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, edge processing, Outposts, Snowball Edge, instance types and families, compute utilization optimization, containers, serverless, microservices, auto scaling, hibernation, load balancing strategies, scaling methods, EC2 hibernation, cost-effective compute services, workload availability classes, instance family and size selection). Design cost-optimized database solutions (cost allocation tags, multi-account billing, Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost and Usage Report, caching strategies, data retention policies, database capacity planning, database connections and proxies, database engines, read replicas, DynamoDB vs RDS, serverless databases, time series format, columnar format, backup and retention policies, database schema and data migration). Design cost-optimized network architectures (cost allocation tags, multi-account billing, Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost and Usage Report, load balancing, NAT gateway costs vs NAT instance costs, network connectivity, Transit Gateway, VPC peering, DNS, NAT gateway configuration, Direct Connect vs VPN vs internet, network routes to minimize transfer costs, CDN and edge caching, network optimizations, throttling strategies, bandwidth allocation).

Key Skills Tested:

• Design solutions that incorporate AWS services to meet current business requirements and future projected needs
• Design architectures that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized
• Review existing solutions and determine improvements
• Apply the AWS Well-Architected Framework principles to solution design
• Design secure access controls and identity management strategies
• Design secure network architectures and application security
• Implement data security controls including encryption at rest and in transit
• Design scalable, loosely coupled, and event-driven architectures
• Design highly available and fault-tolerant systems across multiple Availability Zones and Regions
• Design disaster recovery strategies to meet business requirements
• Design high-performing storage, compute, database, and network solutions
• Design cost-optimized architectures across all AWS service categories
• Select appropriate AWS services based on requirements and use cases
• Design solutions using purpose-built AWS services