AWS SAA-C03 - Solutions Architect Associate#

Claimer: these notes are built around the official SAA-C03 exam guide, skillbuilder.aws and exam-focused question banks. The hands-on “how do I click this in the console” parts live in my AWS notes - this section is the exam theory: what to choose, when, and why.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate is the “bread and butter” AWS certification. It does not test how fast you can click through the console - it tests whether you can look at a business requirement and pick the right architecture from a pile of all-valid-but-not-all-correct answers.

Exam facts#

• SAA-C03 - 65 questions (50 scored, 15 unscored/pilot), 130 minutes
• Score range 1-1000, you need 720 to pass
• Question types: multiple choice and multiple response (pick 2-3)
• No penalty for wrong answers - never leave a question blank
• Valid for 3 years
• Domains and weights:

How I use these notes#

1. Every topic page explains what the service is, when to pick it, and what the exam loves to trick you with.
2. Each page ends with an Exam check (mini questions with answers) and an Ozet (one-line “X = …” summaries).
3. The general-knowledge page collects all those one-liners in one place - my cheat sheet before the exam.
4. Real labs (VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), RDS (Relational Database Service), ECS (Elastic Container Service), EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)…) are in the AWS section - go there when you want to build it, come here when you want to pass it.

AWS SAA-C03 konular#

Domain 1 - Design Secure Architectures#

1. iam-policies-roles-cross-account
2. identity-federation-and-cognito
3. kms-encryption-deep-dive
4. secrets-manager-vs-parameter-store
5. s3-security-and-access-points
6. network-security-sg-nacl-vpc-endpoints
7. security-services-waf-guardduty-inspector
8. governance-monitoring-organizations-config-ssm

Domain 2 - Design Resilient Architectures#

1. ha-vs-fault-tolerance
2. disaster-recovery-strategies
3. elb-and-auto-scaling-resilience
4. decoupling-with-sqs-sns
5. event-driven-eventbridge-step-functions
6. streaming-kinesis-data-streams-firehose
7. rds-and-aurora-failover
8. route53-routing-policies-and-failover
9. vpc-connectivity-peering-tgw-direct-connect

Domain 3 - Design High-Performing Architectures#

1. s3-storage-and-performance
2. block-and-file-storage-ebs-efs-fsx
3. caching-elasticache-cloudfront
4. database-selection-matrix
5. dynamodb-deep-dive
6. compute-performance-ec2-options
7. serverless-and-containers-lambda-ecs-eks
8. data-transfer-and-hybrid-services

Domain 4 - Design Cost-Optimized Architectures#

1. pricing-models-ri-savings-plans-spot
2. s3-cost-and-lifecycle-policies
3. cost-management-tools
4. cost-optimized-architecture-patterns

Architecture Playbook - 5 Golden Blueprints#

General knowledge - cheat sheet#

Practice Exam - 20 Realistic Scenario Questions#

Not: burasi sinav oncesi son tekrar ve deneme bolumu. architecture-playbook en cok cikan 5 mimari sablonu, general-knowledge her servisi tek satirda ozetleyen cheat sheet’i, practice-exam ise gercek sinav zorlugunda 20 senaryo sorusunu icerir.