The associate-level architecture exam. Questions are short scenarios — pick the design that is most secure, most resilient, highest-performing, or cheapest, with one constraint in the stem deciding between two answers that both work. It tests service selection and architectural judgement, not configuration trivia.
Domain weights: design secure architectures 30%, resilient architectures 26%, high-performing architectures 24%, cost-optimized architectures 20%.
For engineers already working in AWS, this exam is also the natural staging ground for the Professional-level SAP-C02: the same question style at lower intensity, over the foundations — DR strategies, storage and database selection, VPC building blocks, purchasing options — that the professional exam assumes and then goes deep on.