SAA-C03 is an architecture exam. It tests whether you can turn constraints into a secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-aware design. The current scored domains are Security 30%, Resilience 26%, Performance 24%, and Cost 20%.
Read every question in this order
- Workload: request/response, batch, stream, file, relational, key-value, or analytics?
- Hard constraint: RPO/RTO, latency, protocol, compliance, ordering, throughput, or budget?
- Scope: one AZ, multiple AZs, Regions, accounts, or on-premises?
- Operations: must it be managed, serverless, automatically scaled, or minimally changed?
- Failure: which component can fail, and what state must survive?
Only then compare services. A technically possible option is often wrong because it violates one adjective such as least operational overhead, near real time, or preserve message order.
A default elimination hierarchy
- Reject anything that violates an explicit security or durability requirement.
- Prefer managed services when the question asks for low operations.
- Prefer Multi-AZ for availability; use Multi-Region only when the requirement crosses Regions.
- Scale horizontally and keep compute stateless unless state is explicitly required.
- Cache or replicate reads; do not confuse them with failover.
- Match pricing to workload shape: steady, interruptible, spiky, or unknown.
Exam lens: AWS questions usually contain several valid architectures. The answer is the one that satisfies every stated constraint with the fewest unnecessary moving parts.
How to use this series
Read articles 2-9 by architecture layer. Use article 10 for analytics selections and article 11 to rehearse cross-domain trade-offs. After each practice question, record the decisive phrase, the rejected service, and the missing fact—not merely the correct letter.
Review card
- Security has the largest domain weight, but all four domains interact.
- Highlight nouns for workload and adjectives for constraints.
- Separate availability, durability, scalability, and performance.
- Prefer the simplest architecture that meets every requirement.
- Review mistakes by decision rule, not by question wording.