AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03)

What it proves

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (exam SAA-C03) shows that you can design solutions on AWS that are secure, resilient, high-performing and cost-optimised. In practice that means choosing and combining the core services: IAM for access, VPC networking with public and private subnets, EC2, Auto Scaling and load balancers, containers and Lambda, S3 and EBS, RDS, Aurora and DynamoDB, and the monitoring and cost tools around them.

Who it is for

AWS recommends at least a year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS, and notes that candidates with one to three years of IT experience have also used it as a starting point. For students and career switchers, it is the right target once you have worked through identity, compute, storage, databases and networking on AWS yourself. It is the associate certification employers mention most often in cloud job posts.

The exam

As listed on the official page in September 2026, the exam lasts 130 minutes and has 65 multiple choice or multiple response questions, mostly short scenarios with a requirement and four options. It costs 150 USD and can be taken at a Pearson VUE test centre or online with a proctor. The certification is valid for three years.

What to study, and in what order

1. Read the official exam guide and note the four domains and their weights.
2. Learn each domain hands-on. Build a VPC with public and private subnets across two availability zones, put an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer, add an RDS database with Multi-AZ, store files in S3 with a lifecycle rule, and set CloudWatch alarms and a budget.
3. Use the free exam prep and practice question sets on AWS Skill Builder. A deeper paid course, such as Adrian Cantrill's, suits people who want long demos to rebuild.
4. For every practice question you miss, find the matching page in the AWS documentation and read why each wrong option is wrong.

Cost and validity

The exam fee is 150 USD. The certification lasts three years; recertify by passing the current version or by earning a professional-level certification.

What to do after it

Publish a project that uses the exam's core services, built with infrastructure as code, with a diagram and a cost report. Then choose by role: CloudOps Engineer Associate (SOA-C03, renamed from SysOps Administrator) for operations and support, Developer Associate for application work, or Solutions Architect Professional once you have designed real systems.

Common questions

Do I need Cloud Practitioner first? No. It is optional.

Can I pass from practice questions alone? Some people do, but you will struggle to use it at work. Build the architectures yourself.