AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Current Guide 2026
Current exam: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03. The older SAA-C02 material on this site is retained as legacy reference material and should not be treated as the current exam blueprint.
AWS currently describes SAA-C03 around designing secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized architectures. The official exam guide organizes the content into four domains: secure architectures, resilient architectures, high-performing architectures, and cost-optimized architectures.
What to study
1. Secure architectures
Focus on IAM, least privilege, encryption, network controls, data protection, and service-level security features.
2. Resilient architectures
Understand multi-AZ design, failure isolation, backups, recovery strategies, decoupling, health checks, and scaling.
3. High-performing architectures
Practice choosing the right compute, storage, database, networking, caching, and content-delivery options for workload requirements.
4. Cost-optimized architectures
Learn how architecture choices affect cost. Compare managed services, purchasing options, storage tiers, data transfer, scaling behavior, and operational overhead.
A practical preparation loop
Learn → Design → Compare trade-offs → Solve scenarios → Review mistakes → Repeat
Do not prepare only by memorizing service definitions. Practice translating requirements into architecture decisions.
High-value connected knowledge
- IAM least privilege
- AWS Well-Architected Framework
- multi-region resilient APIs
- event-driven processing
- secure file uploads
Official source
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 exam guide