How to pass SAA-C03: a 6-week AWS Solutions Architect plan

The official guide asks for at least 1 year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS. If you come from on-premises IT with networking, Linux and databases, six weeks at 6 to 8 hours a week is reasonable. With no IT experience, AWS recommends Cloud Practitioner first (CLF-C02).

Open an AWS account on the Free Tier and set up AWS Budgets alerts on day one: cost is an exam topic in its own right. Download the exam guide and keep it next to you; its task statements are your checklist.

Week 1, IAM and accounts. Users, groups, roles and policies; MFA on the root user; AWS STS and cross-account access; AWS Organizations with SCPs and AWS Control Tower; IAM Identity Center and federation. Practise writing policies and assuming roles across two accounts.

Week 2, VPC and data protection. Public and private subnets, route tables, security groups versus network ACLs, NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, VPN and Direct Connect. Then encryption at rest with AWS KMS, in transit with ACM, key rotation, Secrets Manager, AWS WAF, Shield, GuardDuty, Macie and Cognito. That covers domain 1, 30% of the exam.

Week 3, resilient and loosely coupled architectures. SQS, SNS, EventBridge and Step Functions; API Gateway and Lambda; ECS, EKS and Fargate; Application Load Balancer and Auto Scaling; Route 53 failover; read replicas and RDS Proxy. Finish with disaster recovery strategies and how they map to RPO and RTO.

Week 4, high performance. Choosing between S3, EFS, EBS and FSx; EC2 instance types; Aurora versus DynamoDB and caching with ElastiCache; CloudFront and Global Accelerator; data ingestion and transformation with Kinesis, Glue, Athena and EMR. Build at least one three-tier architecture with an ALB, Auto Scaling across two Availability Zones and a Multi-AZ database.

Week 5, cost optimization. S3 storage classes and lifecycle rules, EBS volume types, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, one shared NAT gateway versus one per AZ, data transfer cost between Regions and AZs, Cost Explorer, Budgets and cost allocation tags. This is domain 4, 20% of the exam.

Week 6, mock exams. Take the free Official Practice Question Set on Skill Builder and one or two full mocks of 65 questions in 130 minutes. AWS also offers an Official Practice Exam with a subscription, which returns a scaled score. Map every miss back to its task statement in the guide.

Start with the free SAA-C03 sample questions to see the format. While studying, practise each domain right after its week, not at the end, so you find gaps while there is still time to close them. For the theory behind each task, use the study guide.

In the SAA-C03 practice questions (start free), always read the explanation, even when you get it right. When you miss one, write a single line on which requirement in the question you overlooked. That list is your review for the last few days.

Picking an answer that works technically but is not what the question asks: if it says "with the least operational overhead", the managed service wins even if the EC2 option also works. Mixing up security groups (stateful) and network ACLs (stateless), or using a NAT gateway where an S3 gateway endpoint is enough.

Another mistake is leaving questions blank: unanswered questions are scored as incorrect and there is no penalty for guessing. Flag doubtful ones with Flag for Review and come back at the end. If you take the exam in English as a non-native speaker, you can request the ESL +30 accommodation before registering.