Here is some useful information to help you prepare for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification exam. I hope these notes will be helpful in your certification journey. Please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]

need more information ? check out my other pages:

• Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Study Notes
• AWS Certified Security Specialty SCS-C01 Study Notes

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/0a95fc77-ef09-48a6-b7ec-65139fdbfcd1/AWS_certification_paths.pdf

SAA-C03 Exam Guide

AWS Exam Guide

Register to the exam - use the 30 minute extension for non native english speakers

Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – online session prior to taking your exam

Training Courses

• Udemy
  • 25 hours of content
  • Content wise, they don’t go as in depth as Adrian Cantrill’s course, but - very detailed and focused on the exam itself.
  • Cost - ~$15
• learn.cantrill.io
  • This is a very detailed and lengthy course. For someone with minimal AWS experience and less than 2 years of professional experience, t
  • Cost: $40
• AWS skill builder
  • the online self paced version of the AWS course

Suggested studying agenda

1. Compute |

• EC2 & EBS- AMIs- Instance types & families- Placement Groups- ENI, ENA, EFA- Purchasing options | Compute EC2 Foundations Option A) AWS re:Invent 2021: Powering Amazon EC2: Deep dive on the AWS Nitro System https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMMybKqC2Y0 EC2 Instance Lifecycle https://broadcast.amazon.com/videos/380079 Purchasing Introducing Savings Plans for Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda - AWS Online Tech Talks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbV8bnbMe9w | | | 1 |

2. Storage |

• EFS- S3- Glacier- Storage Gateway- Snowball | Option A) AWS Storage First Call Deck Video - June 2019 (17 mins) https://broadcast.amazon.com/videos/142952 Option B) An Overview of AWS Storage Services - Webinar (40 mins) https://broadcast.amazon.com/videos/165451 | | | 2 |

3. Networking Part 1 |

• VPC- CIDR- Subnets- Public vs. Private Subnets- NAT Gateway- Internet Gateway- Route Tables | Option A) AWS Networking Fundamentals (42 min) https://broadcast.amazon.com/videos/193991 Option B) AWS re:Invent 2019: AWS networking fundamentals (60 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj4CD73Wmns | | | 2 |

4. Networking Part 2 |

• CloudFront- NACLs- VPN- Direct Connect- VPC Peering- VPC Endpoints- Elastic Load Balancer- Route 53 | Option A) AWS Networking Fundamentals (42 min) https://broadcast.amazon.com/videos/193991 Option B) AWS re:Invent 2019: AWS networking fundamentals (60 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj4CD73Wmns | | | 3 |

5. Databases |

• SQL vs NoSQL- Amazon RDS- DynamoDB- Aurora- Redshift + Redshift Spectrum | Spotlight: Databases on AWS (17 min) https://broadcast.amazon.com/videos/111089 AWS re:Invent 2018 - AWS Databases (26 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K_VHKPeX-M | | | 3 |

6. Security |

• IAM- Users & Groups- IAM Principals- Roles & Permissions- Identity Federation- Cognito- AWS Organizations- CloudTrail | Category Video - Security, Identity, and Compliance FCD https://broadcast.amazon.com/videos/123732 Operations & Caching Decoupling Architectures, Microservices & Serverless https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfr4cs-avCQ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/top-10-security-items-to-improve-in-your-aws-account/ https://wisdom.corp.amazon.com/Pages/WWPS_Security_Initiative.aspx | | | 4 |

7. Operations & Caching |

• CloudWatch- CloudFormation- OpsWorks- Elastic Beanstalk- CloudFront- GlobalAccelerator- DAX- Elasticache | Amazon CloudWatch: Complete Visibility of Your Cloud Resources and Applications (2 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4dhoTQCyRA Introduction to AWS CloudFormation (3 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omppm_YUG2g Introduction to AWS Elastic Beanstalk (2 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiM1xzOX8Qg Introduction to Amazon CloudFront (2 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT-nHW3_SVI AWS Global Accelerator (2 mins) https://youtu.be/GAxrPQ3ycsQ Announcing Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) (1 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RshPGdKXnxc Introduction to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis (3 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoNsuTqeMto | | | 4 |

8. Decoupling Architectures, Microservices & Serverless |

• SQS- SNS- Kinesis- ECS- Lambda & Fargate- API Gateway | Decouple and Scale Applications Using Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS (30 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UesxWuZMZqI Amazon ECS: Core Concepts (6 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq4wL2MiNqo Introduction to AWS Lambda - Serverless Compute on Amazon Web Services ( 3 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOBq__h4OJ4&t=53s | |

Sample / Practice Questions