SAA-C03
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) Study Notes and Practice Tests
Free AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) study notes and practice tests. Design resilient, secure, high-performing, cost-optimized architectures.
What you'll study
- Designing resilient architectures
- High-performing architectures
- Secure applications & networks
- Cost-optimized architectures
- VPC, EC2, S3, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB
Free SAA-C03 practice questions
Try real exam-style questions from the course — no sign-up needed. Open each one to see the answer and explanation.
A team must justify a new architecture against operational, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability goals. Which AWS framework provides this structure?
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Answer: The AWS Well-Architected Framework (six pillars)
The Well-Architected Framework defines six pillars — Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability — used to evaluate and improve architectures.
An EC2-hosted application needs to read from an S3 bucket. What is the most secure way to grant access?
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Answer: Attach an IAM role to the EC2 instance
IAM roles provide temporary, automatically-rotated credentials to the instance with no long-term keys stored — the best-practice approach.
Instances in a private subnet must download OS updates from the internet but must not be reachable from it. What do you use?
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Answer: A NAT gateway in a public subnet
A NAT gateway allows outbound-only internet access for private instances while blocking inbound connections from the internet.
A workload is fault-tolerant batch processing that can handle interruptions and needs the lowest compute cost. Which purchasing option fits best?
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Answer: Spot Instances
Spot Instances use spare capacity at up to ~90% off and are ideal for interruption-tolerant workloads like batch processing.
Objects are accessed unpredictably and you want automatic cost optimisation with no retrieval fees. Which S3 storage class fits?
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Answer: S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between access tiers based on usage with no retrieval fees — ideal for unknown/changing patterns.
Free SAA-C03 flashcards
- Architecting: Architecting Fundamentals · 8 cards
- Architecting: Account Security · 8 cards
- Architecting: Networking 1 · 8 cards
- Architecting: Compute · 8 cards
- Architecting: Storage · 8 cards
- Architecting: Database Services · 8 cards
- Architecting: Monitoring & Scaling · 8 cards
- Architecting: Automation · 8 cards
- Architecting: Containers · 8 cards
- Architecting: Networking 2 · 8 cards
- Architecting: Serverless · 8 cards
- Architecting: Edge Services · 8 cards
- Architecting: Backup & Recovery · 8 cards
Hands-on labs
Practice on real AWS with free, step-by-step labs:
Study notes & practice tests
This certification has a full in-app learning path — module-by-module study notes, spaced-repetition flashcards, and timed practice tests. Create a free account to start.