Exam Review & Tips

1. A checkpoint on your learning journey

You have now been through the whole body of knowledge: IAM and EC2 at the start, then storage, networking, databases, serverless and security, all the way to Disaster Recovery & Migrations and the more advanced architectures. Before you book a date, take stock of how far you have come against the official exam page for AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate.

2. Practice makes perfect

If you are new to AWS, get a bit of practice in before rushing to the exam instead of only reading theory. The exam itself recommends one or more years of hands-on experience on AWS, and that recommendation tells you what the questions are like: they ask about architectural decisions in realistic situations, not about definitions.

If you feel overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge you have just taken in, the deck’s advice is simple and correct: go through it one more time. The second pass is always faster than the first, and it is the pass where the individual pieces start connecting into architectures.

Real-world example

A cheap, on-target way to practice: build a complete classic architecture yourself (ALB, Auto Scaling Group, Multi-AZ RDS, S3, CloudFront), then deliberately break it — take an AZ out, delete a security group rule, fill a disk — and watch the symptoms. Those symptoms are precisely what the exam describes in its scenarios.

3. Exam technique: proceed by elimination

This is the most important section of the chapter: what you score depends on technique at least as much as on what you know.

• Expect scenarios rather than definitions: almost every question paints a situation and asks which approach suits it.
• Attack each one by discarding first — strike out every option you are certain is incorrect.
• Then compare whatever survives and keep the one that fits the situation best.
• Trick questions are rare here, so do not invent traps that the question never set.
• Resist the urge to second-guess yourself.
• A heuristic that pays off repeatedly: an option that would technically work but is wildly complicated is almost certainly not the intended answer.

Exam tip

The order matters: eliminate the answers that are definitely wrong first, and only then compare what is left for the option that makes the most sense in the scenario. And keep the deck’s two closing lines in mind — there are very few trick questions, so do not over-think, and a plausible-sounding but highly complicated option is probably the wrong one.

4. Skim the white papers and read the FAQs

These two official sources fill in exactly the gaps that a theory course does not cover.

White papers

The white papers the deck calls out:

• Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices
• AWS Well-Architected Framework — summarized in the White Papers & Architectures chapter
• AWS Disaster Recovery (https://aws.amazon.com/disaster-recovery/)

Overall, the most important concepts have all been explored in this course; the white papers are supplementary reading, and it is never bad to have a look at the ones you find interesting.

Each service’s FAQ

FAQ stands for frequently asked questions — the per-service page of common questions, for example the VPC FAQ at https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/.

• What the FAQs discuss overlaps heavily with what the exam asks about.
• Reading one is a good way to check that you really understood a service — whether you have its limits and its behavior right.

5. Get into the AWS community

Studying alone makes blind spots easy to keep. The deck suggests several ways to study with other people:

• Help out and discuss with other people in the Q&A of the course you are following.
• Review the questions other people have asked — those are usually the same places where your own understanding is thin.
• Do the practice tests.
• Read forums online and read online blogs.
• Attend local meetups and discuss with other AWS engineers.
• Watch re-invent videos on YouTube (the AWS conference).

6. How the exam works

This is administrative detail, but it is worth knowing in advance so nothing surprises you on the day.

Item	Detail
Registration	Register online at https://www.aws.training/
Fee	150 USD
Identification	Provide one identity document (ID, passport — the details are in the emails sent to you)
Rules	No notes, no pen, no speaking
Questions / time	65 questions in 130 minutes
Passing score	At least 720 out of 1000
Retake	If you fail, you can retake the exam 14 days later

During and after the exam:

• Use the “Flag” feature to mark the questions you want to re-visit.
• At the end you can optionally review all of your questions and answers.
• You will know within 5 days whether you passed or failed (most of the time it is sooner).
• You will know the overall score a few days later, by email notification.
• You will not know which answers were right or wrong.

Exam tip

65 questions in 130 minutes works out to about two minutes per question. Do not let one long scenario eat the time belonging to several other questions: use the “Flag” feature, move on, and come back during the review of all questions and answers at the end.

7. The AWS certification map

After SAA-C03, the AWS certification program is organized into four levels, and knowing the map helps you pick the next step.

Level	Nature	Recommended experience
Foundational	Examines knowledge rather than a role: a base-level grasp of the AWS Cloud	None needed
Associate	Role-based exams that put your AWS skills on the record and make you credible as an AWS Cloud professional	A cloud background, or solid on-premises IT experience, is advised
Professional	Role-based exams pitched at advanced work — designing secure, optimized, modernized applications and automating processes on AWS	2 years of AWS Cloud experience advised
Specialty	Goes deep into one strategic area and positions you as a trusted advisor to stakeholders and customers	Look up the recommended experience in the relevant exam guide

AWS also publishes certification paths by job role, so you can see which direction to dive deep in:

• Architecture: a Solutions Architect builds and looks after cloud infrastructure and the assets on it, and partners with DevOps on moving applications into the cloud; an Application Architect owns the big decisions in an application’s architecture — interface, middleware, infrastructure — so that what the enterprise runs scales, holds up and stays manageable.
• Operations: a Systems Administrator keeps hardware and software installed, current and healthy, and folds automation into that work; a Cloud Engineer runs the networked computing estate and puts the security systems in place that keep its data safe.
• DevOps: a Test Engineer bakes testing and quality practice into development from the first design through release and across the product’s life; a Cloud DevOps Engineer designs, deploys and operates large global hybrid cloud environments and pushes for CI/CD pipelines automated end to end; a DevSecOps Engineer speeds up enterprise cloud adoption while keeping delivery fast and stable, using CI/CD principles, methods and tooling.
• Security: a Cloud Security Engineer shapes security architecture, works detailed cyber security designs out, and builds, runs and measures the controls that protect information; a Cloud Security Architect designs and delivers enterprise cloud solutions with the governance needed to spot business and technical risk, talk about it, and shrink it.
• Development and Networking: a Software Development Engineer writes, assembles and maintains software across platforms and devices; a Network Engineer designs and builds computer and information networks — LANs, WANs, intranets, extranets and so on.
• Data Analytics and AI/ML: a Cloud Data Engineer automates the gathering and processing of structured and semi-structured data and keeps an eye on pipeline performance; a Machine Learning Engineer researches and constructs AI systems that automate predictive models, and designs the machine learning systems, models and schemes behind them; a Machine Learning Ops Engineer stands up and maintains AI and ML platforms and infrastructure and supports model activity and deployment infrastructure in operation; a Data Scientist builds and maintains AI/ML models against business problems, trains and fine tunes them, and judges how well they perform; a Prompt Engineer writes, tests and sharpens text prompts to get the best out of AI language models.

Along these paths AWS marks how necessary each certification is: most are optional for IT/cloud professionals, some are recommended for IT/cloud professionals to leverage AI, to secure AI/ML systems or when working on AI/ML projects, and a few are optional for AI/ML professionals.

8. Congratulations

Congratulations on finishing all 30 chapters. The hope is that you pass the exam without a hitch — and, more valuable than the certificate itself, that you have learned how to really use AWS and will go on to be a tremendously good AWS Solutions Architect.

Quick recap

Item	What to remember for the exam
Format	65 questions in 130 minutes (about 2 minutes each), pass at 720/1000, fee 150 USD, retake after 14 days
Rules on the day	No notes, no pen, no speaking; bring one identity document
During and after	Use Flag for hard questions and review at the end; pass/fail within 5 days, overall score a few days later, and you never learn which answers were wrong
Technique	Mostly scenario based: eliminate the definitely wrong answers, then pick the one that makes the most sense; very few trick questions; an over-complicated option is probably wrong
Preparation	The exam recommends one or more years of hands-on experience; practice, and if you feel overwhelmed, go through the material one more time
Extra reading	Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices, the AWS Well-Architected Framework, AWS Disaster Recovery, and each service’s FAQ
Community	Practice tests, course Q&A, forums, blogs, local meetups, re-invent videos
Certification levels	Foundational (no experience needed), Associate, Professional (2 years recommended), Specialty (dive deep in strategic areas)