Amazon Web Services Solution Architect (SAA-C03)
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification is designed for professionals who want to learn how to design and deploy scalable systems on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The certification validates the ability to design and deploy scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant systems on AWS. The certification exam covers a wide range of topics including AWS core services, security, architecture patterns, and best practices.
Who should take this exam?
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate is a great starting point on the AWS Certification path for individuals who may have any of the following:
Experience in AWS technology
Strong on-premises IT experience and understanding of mapping on-premises to cloud
Experience working in other cloud services
Content outline
This exam guide includes weightings, test domains, and task statements for the exam. It is not a comprehensive listing of the content on the exam. However, additional context for each of the task statements is available to help guide your preparation for the exam. The following table lists the main content domains and their weightings. The table precedes the complete exam content outline, which includes the additional context. The percentage in each domain represents only scored content.
Domain | % of Exam |
Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures | 30% |
Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures | 26% |
Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures | 24% |
Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% |
TOTAL | 100% |
I.VIRTUALIZATION
- Introduction
- Deploying Virtual Machines
- HYPERVISOR
- Type1 Hypervisor, Type2 Hypervisor
b. Types of Hardware Virtualization- Full Virtualization
- Emulation Virtualization
- Paravirtualization
II. Introduction to Cloud Computing
- Similar concepts
- Characteristics
- Service models
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Platform as a service (PaaS)
Software as a service (SaaS)
Serverless computing
Function as a service (FaaS)
Firewall as a Service (FWaas)
4.0 Deployment models
4.1 Private cloud
4.2 Public cloud
4.3 Hybrid cloud
- Architecture
- Security and privacy
- Limitations and Disadvantages
III. AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Domain: Design Secure Applications and Architectures
- Deep dive on AWS Identity & Access Management
- Amazon Cognito for web & mobile security
- AWS Organizations – Service Control Policies (SCPs)
- Protecting application with AWS WAF, Firewall Manager, and Shield
- Understand AWS logging mechanisms
- Audit, monitor and evaluate with AWS Configuring and AWS CloudTrail
- Data encryption using the AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
Domain: Design Resilient Architectures
- AWS Global Infrastructure (Regions, Availability Zones, Edge Locations, Regions Edge Caches)
- Multi-tiered architectures within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- Amazon Route 53
- Amazon CloudFront
- Disaster recovery and business continuity strategies
- Decoupled and event-driven architectures
- AWS storage services
Domain: Design High-Performing Architectures
- Auto-scaling and application and network elastic load balancers
- Amazon EC2, ECS, and Elastic Beanstalk
- Storage performance with the Elastic File System and Amazon S3 features
- VPC Networking components: Subnets/ENIs/ENA’s/NACLs/Security Groups/NAT Gateways/ Bastion hosts/VPC Endpoints/VPN/Direct Connect/Transit Gateway/AWS Global Accelerator
- AWS Databases
- High availability across Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora
- Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
Domain : Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
- AWS storage costs across Amazon S3, Glacier, EFS, Storage Gateway, AWS Backup
- Savings plans and reserved instances for compute instances
- Cost optimization across the network infrastructure
