Exam SAA-C03
SAA-C03 DOMAIN-WISE PRACTICE

Practice by Domain

Select a domain below to see multiple question sets.
Each set is 20 questions — rotate through sets to master the full domain.

Design Secure Architectures
30% of exam • 300 questions • 15 sets
Choose a set
Design Resilient Architectures
26% of exam • 250 questions • 13 sets
Choose a set
Design High-Performing Architectures
24% of exam • 225 questions • 12 sets
Choose a set
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
20% of exam • 200 questions • 10 sets
Choose a set

What Each Domain Covers

Design Secure Architectures 30%
  • IAM: users, roles, policies, permission boundaries, SCP
  • Resource-based vs identity-based policies
  • AWS KMS, encryption at rest and in transit
  • VPC security: NACLs, Security Groups, VPC endpoints
  • AWS Shield, WAF, GuardDuty, Macie, Inspector
Exam Tip: Least privilege is almost always the right answer. Know IAM roles (assume role) vs. IAM users vs. instance profiles.
Design Resilient Architectures 26%
  • Multi-AZ deployments for RDS, Elasticache, ALB
  • Auto Scaling: target tracking, step scaling, scheduled
  • ELB: ALB vs. NLB vs. CLB and when to use each
  • Route 53 routing policies (failover, weighted, latency)
  • S3 cross-region replication, versioning, lifecycle
Exam Tip: Multi-AZ = availability/failover (synchronous). Read replica = performance/DR (asynchronous). Both can be used together.
Design High-Performing Architectures 24%
  • EC2 instance types (compute, memory, storage, accelerated)
  • ElastiCache: Redis vs. Memcached use cases
  • CloudFront edge caching, Lambda@Edge
  • SQS, SNS, Kinesis: decoupling and streaming patterns
  • RDS read replicas, DynamoDB DAX, Aurora Serverless
Exam Tip: When you see "reduce latency", think caching (ElastiCache, DAX, CloudFront). When you see "decouple", think SQS or SNS.
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20%
  • EC2 purchasing options: On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Savings Plans
  • S3 storage tiers: Standard, IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier
  • Auto Scaling to match demand (no idle resources)
  • Right-sizing using Cost Explorer + Trusted Advisor
  • Serverless (Lambda, Fargate) to eliminate idle compute
Exam Tip: Spot Instances for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads. Reserved for steady-state 1-3 year commitments. Savings Plans are more flexible than RIs.