A six-week plan assuming six to eight hours a week, written for engineers who already work in AWS daily. Without that background, double the timeline rather than the weekly hours.
The exam
| Code | SAA-C03 |
| Questions | 65, of which 50 are scored |
| Time | 130 minutes |
| Passing score | 720 on a 100 to 1000 scale |
| Cost | 150 USD |
| Valid for | 3 years |
| Format | Multiple choice and multiple response |
| Prerequisite | None |
Domain weights: design secure architectures 30 percent, resilient architectures 26 percent, high-performing architectures 24 percent, cost-optimized architectures 20 percent.
The exam tests service selection under a constraint: most questions offer two answers that would work, and one detail in the scenario — a compliance clause, a latency number, an ops-team size — decides between them. Practice is mostly about reading for that detail.
Weekly rhythm
Two sessions of two to three hours plus one short session. A repeatable shape:
- Read the documentation or FAQ for the week’s services, 60 to 90 minutes.
- Build or break something small in a sandbox account, 60 minutes. Engineers who work through the console daily can trade this for reading; the exam uses the console’s vocabulary.
- Answer 15 to 20 practice questions and read every explanation, including for the ones answered correctly. 45 minutes.
The plan
Week 1, security (Domain 1)
Read the exam guide end to end, including the in-scope services list. Then IAM mechanics: roles versus users, cross-account roles, instance profiles, permissions boundaries, and when IAM Identity Center or Cognito is the answer instead. Security groups versus network ACLs — stateful versus stateless decides several questions. VPC endpoints, NAT gateways, and what “no internet traversal” implies. KMS key types, SSE-S3 versus SSE-KMS, S3 Object Lock modes, Secrets Manager versus Parameter Store.
Checkpoint: drill Domain 1 questions.
Week 2, resilience (Domain 2)
Decoupling: SQS standard versus FIFO, dead-letter queues, SNS fan-out, EventBridge routing, Step Functions for stateful workflows. Then availability: RDS Multi-AZ versus read replicas — the exam’s favourite confusion — static stability arithmetic across Availability Zones, Route 53 routing policies, DynamoDB global tables, EFS versus EBS scope, and the four DR strategies with their RTO and RPO shapes.
Checkpoint: drill Domain 2, then a first timed full mock. Log misses by domain; expect a rough score.
Week 3, performance (Domain 3)
Storage selection: EBS volume types by workload, EFS versus FSx variants (Windows, Lustre, NetApp), S3 performance features. Compute selection: Lambda versus containers versus EC2, Fargate versus EC2 launch types, placement groups. Database performance: caching with ElastiCache, DAX, Aurora reader endpoints, DynamoDB at scale. Network performance: CloudFront versus Global Accelerator — cacheable HTTP versus TCP/UDP with static IPs — and Direct Connect versus VPN. Ingestion: Kinesis Data Streams versus Firehose versus SQS.
Checkpoint: drill Domain 3.
Week 4, cost (Domain 4)
S3 storage classes and lifecycle rules, including where Intelligent- Tiering beats guessing. Purchasing: Spot versus Savings Plans versus Reserved Instances, and which Savings Plan follows a changing fleet. Database capacity: on-demand versus provisioned DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless. Network economics: gateway endpoints versus NAT processing, CloudFront’s effect on egress, peering versus Transit Gateway for small topologies.
Checkpoint: drill Domain 4, then a second timed mock. Target 80 percent or better.
Week 5, weak areas
No new material. Weak-areas mode until the misses stop repeating, the official practice question set on AWS Skill Builder, and a re-read of the exam guide’s task statements — for each one, name the services that answer it without looking.
Week 6, exam week
Book the exam at the start of the week if it is not already booked. Two light review sessions, nothing new after midweek, sit the exam.
Booking and logistics
Pearson VUE test centre or online proctoring. 130 minutes for 65 questions is two minutes each; flag anything unresolved after 90 seconds and return to it. Anyone holding an active AWS certification should check their certification account for a 50 percent discount voucher before paying — and passing this exam issues a new voucher usable toward a professional-level exam.
Reading list, in priority order
- The SAA-C03 exam guide, including the in-scope services list.
- AWS Well-Architected Framework, the Reliability and Security pillars.
- Service FAQs for S3, EC2, VPC, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, and CloudFront — dense in exactly the distinctions the exam tests.
- The SAP-C02 tie-breakers cheat sheet on this site: its decision tables cover the same choices this exam tests, at one level deeper.
How to know you are ready
When reading a scenario, the constraint that decides it should stand out before the options are read. Consistently spotting it — and scoring around 80 percent on timed mocks — is the signal to book.