AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam Guide
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam Guide
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam Guide
Introduction
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) exam is intended for individuals who perform
in a solutions architect role. The exam validates a candidate’s ability to design secure and robust solutions
by using AWS technologies.
The exam also validates a candidate’s ability to complete the following tasks:
Design a solution by using appropriate AWS services and by following architectural principles
based on requirements
Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the
workload lifecycle
Hands-on experience using compute, networking, storage, management, and database AWS
services
The ability to identify and define technical requirements for a solution that involves AWS
technology
The ability to identify which AWS services meet a given technical requirement
An understanding of best practices for building well-architected solutions on AWS
An understanding of the AWS global infrastructure
An understanding of AWS security services and features in relation to traditional services
For a detailed list of specific tools and technologies that might be covered on the exam, as well as a list of
in-scope AWS services, refer to the Appendix.
Multiple choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors)
Multiple response: Has two or more correct responses out of five or more response options
Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or
incorrect answers, are response options that a candidate with incomplete knowledge or skill might choose.
Distractors are generally plausible responses that match the content area.
Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing. The exam includes 50
questions that will affect your score.
Unscored content
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about
candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored
questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
Exam results
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is a pass or fail exam. The exam is scored against a
minimum standard established by AWS professionals who follow certification industry best practices and
guidelines.
Your results for the exam are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 720.
Your score shows how you performed on the exam as a whole and whether or not you passed. Scaled
scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty
levels.
Your score report could contain a table of classifications of your performance at each section level. This
information provides general feedback about your exam performance. The exam uses a compensatory
scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to
pass only the overall exam.
Each section of the exam has a specific weighting, so some sections have more questions than other
sections have. The table contains general information that highlights your strengths and weaknesses. Use
caution when interpreting section-level feedback.
Content outline
This exam guide includes weightings, test domains, and objectives for the exam. It is not a comprehensive
listing of the content on the exam. However, additional context for each of the objectives 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.
TOTAL 100%
Compute
Cost management
Database
Disaster recovery
High availability
Management and governance
Microservices and component decoupling
Migration and data transfer
Networking, connectivity, and content delivery
Security
Serverless design principles
Storage
Application Integration:
Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
Database:
Amazon Aurora
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon RDS
Amazon Redshift
Storage:
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
Amazon FSx
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 Glacier
AWS Storage Gateway