Examworthyexamworthy.comAWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional cheat sheet
Amazon Web Services
Free to share. Examworthy is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services; SAP-C02 and related marks belong to their respective owners.
At a glance
Format: Multiple choice and multiple response
Domain weight map
Heaviest first - spend your time hereHow this exam thinks
SAP-C02 is a pick-the-best-architecture exam at estate scale: long multi-constraint scenarios where three options work and the right one is the managed, requirement-fit design that satisfies every stated limit (cost, resilience scope, operational overhead, no application change, RTO and RPO, compliance) at once.
Spot the trap
Tempting wrong answers, and why they failCommon misconception
That termination protection keeps a database's data safe through a forced replacement. It only blocks deleting the whole stack; Retain policies protect the resource itself.
Design for New Solutions
Common misconception
That a full mesh of VPC peering scales to many VPCs. Peering is non-transitive, so the link count grows roughly with the square of VPC count.
Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
Common misconception
That paging an on-call engineer counts as automated recovery. A human must still act, so the outage continues until they do.
Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions
Common misconception
That rewriting an application into containers is always the safer, more future-proof choice, even under a hard deadline a full rewrite cannot meet.
Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
Common misconception
That running weekly vulnerability scans and opening tickets counts as patching a fleet. Inspector finds missing patches but never installs them; Patch Manager does.
Design for New Solutions
Common misconception
That security groups and NACLs alone isolate production from development. A shared route table still lets every attachment route to every other.
Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
Common misconception
That a documented runbook plus an on-call page is automatic remediation. A person still has to read it and act, so nothing runs itself.
Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions
Common misconception
That a flat contingency percentage added to an estimate covers whatever costs were left out, without identifying what is actually missing.
Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
Key terms
Exam-day rules
- Read the long stem for its binding constraint before judging any option. Professional scenarios name several limits at once (cost, RTO and RPO, operational overhead, no application change, a compliance control); the one that breaks the tie is what picks the answer, and the rest is noise.
- When two designs both work, default to the managed, lowest-overhead one. AWS prefers managed and native services, so Transit Gateway over EC2 routers, change sets over rollback triggers, MGN over manual image export; reach for the manual option only when the scenario names a reason such as an engine to preserve or a provider with no managed rotation.
- Treat a service control policy as the answer for any control that must hold against an account administrator. An SCP is evaluated above IAM, so it binds every principal preventatively; a permission boundary, a Config rule or a Security Hub finding cannot, and offering one of those is the trap.
- On multiple-response questions, both halves must be right or you score nothing. These often pair a network-layer control with a service-layer control, or a remediation action with a preventative guardrail; pick the complementary pair, not two answers that do the same job.
- Match the migration tooling to what is moving. AWS Application Migration Service replicates whole servers for low-downtime rehosting, AWS Database Migration Service moves database rows with full-load-plus-change-data-capture for near-zero downtime, and the 7Rs label (repurchase, replatform, rehost) classifies the workload before any move.
Revision schedule
- Day 1Map the four domains and book a date
- Week 1Build the estate-scale decision trees
- Weeks 1 to 2Go deep on organisational complexity (Domain 1)
- Weeks 2 to 3Master new-solution design (Domain 2)
- Weeks 3 to 4Lock continuous improvement and migration (Domains 3 and 4)