Solutions Architect Associate mindmap

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03)

Design solutions on AWS that follow the Well-Architected Framework. Check the official exam guide for current domains and weights.

• Domain 1: Design secure architectures (30%)
  • Task 1.1: Secure access to AWS resources: IAM, IAM Identity Center, STS, AWS Control Tower and SCPs
  • Task 1.2: Secure workloads and applications: VPC security components, segmentation, Shield, WAF, Secrets Manager, VPN and Direct Connect
  • Task 1.3: Data security controls: Encryption at rest and in transit, key policies and rotation, backups, retention
• Domain 2: Design resilient architectures (26%)
  • Task 2.1: Scalable and loosely coupled architectures: SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, API Gateway, containers and serverless
  • Task 2.2: Highly available and fault-tolerant architectures: Multi-AZ and Multi-Region designs, load balancing, Route 53, DR, RDS Proxy
    • Disaster recovery: Backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, multi-site active/active
• Domain 3: Design high-performing architectures (24%)
  • Task 3.1: High-performing and scalable storage: S3, EBS, EFS, hybrid storage
  • Task 3.2: High-performing and elastic compute: EC2 instance types, Auto Scaling, Lambda, containers, Batch, EMR
  • Task 3.3: High-performing databases: Engines, Aurora, DynamoDB, read replicas, caching with ElastiCache
  • Task 3.4: High-performing and scalable networks: CloudFront, Global Accelerator, load balancing, VPN, Direct Connect, PrivateLink
  • Task 3.5: Data ingestion and transformation: Kinesis, Glue, Athena, Lake Formation, DataSync, EMR
• Domain 4: Design cost-optimized architectures (20%)
  • Task 4.1: Cost-optimized storage: Storage classes, lifecycle rules, EBS volume types, backup and archive
  • Task 4.2: Cost-optimized compute: Spot, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, rightsizing, load balancer choice
  • Task 4.3: Cost-optimized databases: Serverless options, engine choice, backup and retention, caching
  • Task 4.4: Cost-optimized networks: NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, data transfer, connectivity choices