AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

Solutions Architect Associate is the AWS certification employers ask for by name, and it is a design exam rather than a memory test. Almost every question is a scenario: given a workload, a constraint and a budget, choose the architecture that fits. The programme is therefore built around trade-offs — when S3 beats EBS, when Aurora beats RDS, when the cheapest answer is also the wrong one — and follows the four domains of the SAA-C03 guide at their published weightings. Students build and tear down real architectures in their own AWS account throughout.

• Design multi-AZ, fault-tolerant architectures using ELB and Auto Scaling
• Choose correctly between S3 storage classes, EBS volume types and EFS
• Design VPCs with public and private subnets, NAT, and security groups
• Apply IAM roles, policies and least privilege to real workloads
• Select the right database: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache
• Decouple systems with SQS, SNS and EventBridge
• Use CloudFront and Route 53 for global performance and failover
• Estimate and reduce cost with the right pricing model and storage tiering

1. 01Read a workload scenario and identify the constraint that actually decides the architecture
2. 02Design a highly available application tier that survives the loss of an availability zone
3. 03Build a secure VPC from scratch and explain every routing and security decision in it
4. 04Choose a data store on access pattern and consistency needs rather than familiarity
5. 05Reduce the running cost of an existing architecture without weakening its resilience
6. 06Sit the SAA-C03 exam with coverage of all four published domains