SAA-C03AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
What the exam covers
Study guide
From AWS
About SAA-C03
The most taken AWS exam. Almost every question is a short scenario with a constraint ("most cost-effective", "least operational overhead", "highly available") and four designs that all work. Your job is to find the one that fits the constraint best.
Who it's for. Engineers and architects with some hands-on AWS time who design systems, and anyone aiming for the Professional exam later.
How to prepare
- Underline the deciding phrase in each question. "Least operational overhead" almost always means the managed or serverless option.
- Storage and database selection is a large share of the exam. Know S3 storage classes, EBS volume types, and the Aurora, DynamoDB and RDS trade-offs.
- For resilience, separate high availability (Multi-AZ) from disaster recovery (cross-Region) and know the four DR strategies by RTO and RPO.
Sample SAA-C03 questions
Try these with the answers on the page, then practise the full bank.
- A web application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone and stores its data in a Single-AZ Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The company wants the application to keep working if that Availability Zone fails. Which two changes meet this requirement? (Choose two.) Design resilient architectures
- A company is choosing Amazon S3 storage classes for data in the same AWS Region. Order these storage classes from the highest to the lowest storage price per GB-month. Consider storage price only, not retrieval or request charges. Design cost-optimized architectures
- Match each requirement to the AWS service or feature that meets it best. Design high-performing architectures
- A platform must ingest millions of IoT sensor readings per hour and query them with time-range scans. Which AWS database is purpose-built for this workload? Design high-performing architectures
- A Lambda function processing financial transactions sees 3-5 second cold starts and misses a 200 ms response requirement for business-critical requests. Which feature minimizes cold starts? Design high-performing architectures
- A company streams live sporting events to millions of concurrent viewers worldwide with minimal buffering. Which CloudFront configuration suits live video delivery? Design high-performing architectures
- A web application must push stock price updates to thousands of connected users with sub-second latency, in a read-heavy pattern with one writer and many readers. Which AWS service is optimized for this publish-subscribe, real-time delivery pattern? Design high-performing architectures
- An application serves personalized content and its APIs must authenticate requests carrying JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) issued by a third-party identity provider such as Auth0. The authentication must happen at the API layer, without custom verification code in each microservice. Which AWS service handles JWT validation there? Design high-performing architectures
- All 31 sample questions
Questions people ask
Is this SAA-C03 practice exam free?
Yes. All 203 questions, the timed mock exam and the explanations are free, and there's no account to create.
Are these real exam questions?
No. Real exam questions are confidential under the AWS candidate agreement. These are practice questions written to cover the same domains in the same scenario style, each with an explanation of why the answer is right.
How is the SAA-C03 mock exam scored?
Questions are drawn from every domain in proportion to the exam guide, and you get a raw percentage with a breakdown by domain. AWS uses scaled scoring, so treat 75% or more here as a sign you're ready rather than a predicted score.
Where is my progress saved?
In your browser, on this device. Nothing is sent to us apart from the answers you check, and clearing site data resets it.