AWS SAA — AWS Solutions Architect Associate

This is a scenario-based exam. Questions describe a business problem and ask you to choose the best architecture. Focus on understanding trade-offs between services rather than memorizing individual service features.

Security is the heaviest domain at 30%. Know IAM policies deeply: identity-based vs resource-based, permission boundaries, cross-account roles, and when to use AWS Organizations SCPs vs IAM policies.

VPC networking trips up many candidates. Master the differences between security groups (stateful) and NACLs (stateless), NAT Gateway vs NAT Instance, and when to use VPC Peering vs Transit Gateway vs PrivateLink.

Database questions are common and tricky. Know when to choose RDS Multi-AZ (HA) vs read replicas (performance), Aurora vs standard RDS, DynamoDB vs relational databases, and ElastiCache Redis vs Memcached.

For disaster recovery, know the four strategies by increasing cost and decreasing RTO: backup & restore, pilot light, warm standby, and active-active (multi-site). Match each to the business requirements in the question.

Cost optimization questions often hinge on workload patterns: Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for steady-state, Spot for fault-tolerant and flexible, On-Demand for unpredictable short-term. S3 lifecycle policies and storage class selection are also frequently tested.

Look for keywords in questions: 'most cost-effective' means choose the cheapest viable option, 'least operational overhead' means choose managed/serverless services, 'highest availability' means multi-AZ or multi-Region.

You get 130 minutes for 65 questions (2 minutes each). Flag difficult questions and return to them. 15 questions are unscored (experimental) but you cannot tell which ones, so answer every question.