Examworthyexamworthy.comAWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate cheat sheet
Amazon Web Services
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At a glance
Format: Multiple choice and multiple response
Domain weight map
Heaviest first - spend your time hereHow this exam thinks
SAA-C03 is a pick-the-right-design exam: almost every question is a scenario with security, resilience, performance, and cost constraints, and the right answer is the managed AWS service or pattern that satisfies all of them with the least operational overhead.
Spot the trap
Tempting wrong answers, and why they failCommon misconception
That keys held in Secrets Manager no longer count as static credentials. The application still signs requests with a long-lived IAM user key, so nothing has been removed.
Design Secure Architectures
Common misconception
That every consumer polling one SQS queue gets its own copy of each message. A standard queue hands each message to a single consumer, so competing tasks split the events between them.
Design Resilient Architectures
Common misconception
That the way to buy more IOPS is to buy more capacity. That held for gp2, where baseline IOPS scaled with volume size; gp3 provisions IOPS separately from size.
Design High-Performing Architectures
Common misconception
That the lower per-gigabyte rate of Standard-Infrequent Access makes it the cheapest place to put everything. Its retrieval fee on every read can wipe out the storage saving.
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Common misconception
That an explicit Deny always beats an Allow whatever its conditions say. A Deny fires only when its conditions match the request, so a non-matching Deny leaves the Allow standing.
Design Secure Architectures
Common misconception
That a standard queue delivers in order and only once if the visibility timeout is long enough. Ordering and deduplication come from a FIFO queue, not from tuning a timeout.
Design Resilient Architectures
Common misconception
That Trusted Advisor gives per-workload right-sizing. Its cost checks only flag low utilisation coarsely, while Compute Optimizer models the history and names an instance type.
Design High-Performing Architectures
Common misconception
That Intelligent-Tiering is always the cheapest choice. Its per-object monitoring charge buys nothing when the date the data turns cold is already known.
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Key terms
Exam-day rules
- Read the scenario for its constraint first. The security, availability, performance, or cost limit named in the question is what picks the answer, so find it before you judge the options.
- When two services both work, default to the managed, least-overhead one. AWS prefers managed services and well-architected defaults; reach for the manual option only when the scenario names a reason such as an existing engine to preserve.
- Treat broad permissions as a wrong answer. Any option granting AdministratorAccess or embedding long-lived keys is the trap; least privilege through a scoped IAM role almost always wins the security questions.
- Let the access pattern pick storage and databases. Shared file access means EFS, object means S3, key-value at scale means DynamoDB, relational that idles means Aurora Serverless v2; do not default to the service you know best.
- Watch the cost-versus-durability trap. When a question stresses lowest cost but the data is irreplaceable or must survive a zone failure, the cheapest class (One Zone-IA) is usually the wrong answer; Standard-IA is the fit.
Revision schedule
- Day 1Map the blueprint and book a date
- Week 1Build the service-selection maps
- Weeks 1 to 3Go deep on secure and resilient design (Domains 1 and 2)
- Weeks 3 to 4Lock storage, database, and performance selection (Domain 3)
- Week 4Cover cost optimisation and its traps (Domain 4)