The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) is a 130-minute exam of 65 questions, and you pass with a scaled score of 720 out of 1,000. It tests your ability to design well-architected solutions on AWS. It is one of the most popular cloud certifications, and very passable with a structured plan. Here is how the exam is built and how to prepare for it.

The exam format at a glance

SAA-C03 gives you 65 questions in 130 minutes. They come as multiple choice, with one correct answer, and multiple response, with two or more. Of the 65, only 50 are scored; the other 15 are unscored trial questions you cannot identify, so answer every question as if it counts. There is no penalty for guessing, so never leave a blank. The pass mark is a scaled 720 on a 100 to 1,000 range. Always confirm the current details on the official AWS exam page before you book.

The four domains and their weightings

The exam is organised into four domains, weighted unevenly. Study in proportion to those weightings rather than giving every area equal time:

  • Design Secure Architectures (30%)
  • Design Resilient Architectures (26%)
  • Design High-Performing Architectures (24%)
  • Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%)

Security is the largest single domain, so identity, access management and data protection deserve real attention. Resilience and performance together make up half the exam, so multi-availability-zone design, decoupling and scaling are core. Cost optimisation is smallest but still one question in five.

Who it is for

AWS positions this as an associate-level certification and recommends around a year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS. You can prepare without exactly that, but you will learn far faster if you actually build things in a free-tier account rather than only reading. The exam rewards judgement about trade-offs, which is hard to fake from memorisation alone.

A week-by-week approach

  • Weeks one to two: learn the core services, compute, storage, networking and databases, and the AWS Well-Architected Framework that underpins the exam's thinking.
  • Weeks three to five: work through the four domains in proportion to their weightings, building small hands-on examples as you go.
  • Week six: shift to full, timed mocks, and use each one to find and close your weakest domain.

Adjust the length to the time you actually have, but keep the shape: fundamentals first, domain depth next, then timed practice.

Practise under real exam conditions

SAA-C03 is as much about pacing and scenario reading as raw knowledge, so rehearsing the format matters. CandidatesPrep gives you timed mocks scored by domain, so you can see whether your security or resilience scores are where they need to be and where to spend your final week. Sitting several full mocks also builds the stamina the 130-minute clock demands. Trainers can put a whole team through the same track.

After you pass

The certification is valid for three years. Plan for recertification from the start, and consider it a foundation: many candidates go on to professional-level or speciality AWS certifications from here.

The bottom line

Learn the fundamentals, respect the domain weightings, build things hands-on, and rehearse under a real clock. With a structured plan, SAA-C03 is a very achievable and highly regarded step into cloud architecture.

Ready to test yourself? Sit a timed mock on the CandidatesPrep simulator, or book a demo to prepare a team for AWS certification.