AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate 2026 Syllabus & Pattern

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Syllabus 2026

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) certification evaluates the ability to design cloud solutions using AWS services and architectural best practices. The examination is designed around the AWS Well-Architected Framework and tests whether candidates can create solutions that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized.

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate syllabus 2026 is organized into four major content domains. Candidates are expected to understand how different AWS services and architectural choices can be applied to business requirements, including the design of new solutions and the improvement of existing workloads.

The four official domains are Design Secure Architectures, Design Resilient Architectures, Design High-Performing Architectures, and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures. Each domain carries a different weight in the scored portion of the examination.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Subject-Wise Syllabus

1. Design Secure Architectures – 30%

Security is the largest weighted domain in the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam syllabus. Candidates need to understand how identity, access, networking, applications, and data can be protected within an AWS architecture.

Preparation should include practical architectural decisions involving AWS Identity and Access Management, multi-account environments, network security, encryption, and data protection. Questions may require candidates to choose the most suitable security design for a particular workload or business requirement.

• Designing secure access to AWS resources
• Identity and access management concepts
• IAM users, groups, roles, and policies
• Role-based access control and temporary credentials
• Multi-account security strategies
• Cross-account access
• Federated access and identity services
• Principle of least privilege
• Multi-factor authentication
• AWS shared responsibility model
• AWS Regions and Availability Zones
• Resource policies and authorization strategies
• Secure workloads and applications
• Application configuration and credential security
• AWS service endpoints
• Ports, protocols, and network traffic controls
• Security groups and network ACLs
• Public and private subnet design
• Network segmentation strategies
• VPC security architecture
• NAT gateways and secure routing
• AWS security services and their use cases
• Application protection against external threats
• DDoS protection and web application security concepts
• Secure VPN and AWS Direct Connect connectivity
• Data access and governance
• Data classification and retention
• Encryption at rest
• Encryption in transit
• AWS Key Management Service concepts
• Certificate and TLS-related security
• Encryption key access policies
• Data backup and replication
• Data lifecycle and protection policies
• Key rotation and certificate renewal
• Compliance-related architectural requirements

2. Design Resilient Architectures – 26%

The resilience domain examines whether candidates can design systems that continue operating effectively as workloads grow or when infrastructure components fail. AWS architectural choices involving availability, fault tolerance, scaling, loose coupling, and recovery are central to this part of the syllabus.

Candidates should understand how distributed components work together and how managed services can reduce operational dependency. The syllabus also requires familiarity with approaches for improving availability and designing systems that can recover from disruptions.

• Designing scalable and loosely coupled architectures
• API creation and management
• REST API concepts and API Gateway use cases
• AWS managed services and appropriate use cases
• Caching strategies
• Microservices architecture
• Stateless and stateful workloads
• Event-driven architectures
• Horizontal and vertical scaling
• Content delivery and edge acceleration
• Application migration into containers
• Load balancing concepts
• Application Load Balancer concepts
• Multi-tier architecture design
• Queuing and messaging concepts
• Publish/subscribe architectures
• Serverless technologies and architectural patterns
• AWS Lambda and container-based workloads
• Container orchestration concepts
• Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS use cases
• Object, file, and block storage characteristics
• Database read replicas
• Workflow orchestration
• Event-driven and microservice-based solution design
• Scaling strategies for architecture components
• Loose coupling using AWS services
• Purpose-built AWS services for workloads
• Designing highly available architectures
• Designing fault-tolerant architectures
• Availability Zones and AWS Regions
• Amazon Route 53 concepts
• Disaster recovery and recovery strategies
• Failure handling and redundancy
• Multi-AZ architecture design
• Backup and replication approaches
• High availability for compute, storage, networking, and databases

3. Design High-Performing Architectures – 24%

Performance optimization forms the third major domain of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate syllabus. Here, the emphasis is on matching workloads with suitable AWS compute, storage, database, networking, and data-processing services.

Rather than testing isolated service definitions, this domain evaluates architectural judgment. Candidates should be able to compare available options and select solutions that can meet workload requirements related to throughput, scalability, latency, elasticity, and processing performance.

• High-performing and scalable storage solutions
• Storage service selection based on workload requirements
• Storage performance characteristics
• Object, file, and block storage
• Storage throughput and capacity considerations
• Scalable storage architectures
• High-performing and elastic compute solutions
• Compute service selection
• Elasticity and automatic scaling
• Workload-specific compute configurations
• Load balancing strategies
• Container and serverless compute options
• Performance optimization for compute workloads
• High-performing database solutions
• Relational and non-relational database selection
• Database performance characteristics
• Read replicas and database scaling
• Caching strategies for database workloads
• Database connection and access considerations
• High-performing and scalable network architectures
• Networking and connectivity requirements
• Content delivery strategies
• Network performance and latency considerations
• Scalable network architecture design
• High-performing data ingestion solutions
• Data transformation solutions
• Data transfer services and use cases
• Streaming data architectures
• Data lake concepts
• Data processing compute options
• Data visualization strategies
• Data ingestion configuration
• Transformation between different data formats

4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures – 20%

Cost optimization requires candidates to balance technical requirements with efficient use of AWS resources. This domain tests the ability to select services, configurations, storage options, database designs, compute models, and network architectures that meet workload requirements without unnecessary expenditure.

Knowledge of AWS cost-management tools is important, but candidates must also understand the architectural decisions that influence ongoing cloud costs. Service selection, capacity planning, data lifecycle management, and efficient data transfer are all relevant to this domain.

• Cost-optimized storage solutions
• AWS cost management concepts
• Cost allocation tags
• Multi-account billing concepts
• AWS Cost Explorer
• AWS Budgets
• Cost and Usage Report concepts
• Storage services and appropriate use cases
• Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, and Amazon FSx use cases
• Backup and archival strategies
• HDD and SSD block storage options
• Data lifecycle management
• Hybrid storage solutions
• Storage access patterns
• Storage tiering
• Storage capacity planning
• Cost-effective data transfer to AWS storage
• Storage auto scaling considerations
• S3 object lifecycle management
• Cost-optimized compute solutions
• Compute capacity and workload requirements
• Appropriate compute service selection
• Elastic and scalable compute design
• Cost-effective compute configurations
• Cost-optimized database solutions
• Database capacity planning
• Database connections and proxies
• Database engine selection
• Relational and non-relational database services
• Database replication and read replicas
• Database backup and retention policies
• Cost-effective database migration approaches
• Cost-optimized network architectures
• Network service selection
• Cost considerations for data transfer
• Efficient connectivity and network design
• Cost management tools for architecture decisions

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam Pattern

Particular Details Exam Name AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam Code SAA-C03 Certification Level Associate Total Questions 65 questions Scored Questions 50 questions Unscored Questions 15 questions Exam Duration 130 minutes Question Types Multiple choice and multiple response Multiple-Choice Format One correct answer from the available response options Multiple-Response Format Two or more correct answers may be selected from the available response options Score Range 100–1,000 Minimum Passing Score 720 Negative Marking No penalty for guessing Unanswered Questions Unanswered questions are treated as incorrect Result Pass or Fail Scoring Model Overall performance is used; candidates are not required to achieve a passing score in every individual domain AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam Domain Weightage

Content Domain Weightage Design Secure Architectures 30% Design Resilient Architectures 26% Design High-Performing Architectures 24% Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20% AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Preparation Strategy

Begin by understanding the four official content domains and their relative weightage. Security deserves substantial attention because it carries the highest share of scored content, but preparation should cover all domains because AWS uses an overall scoring model.

Study AWS services in the context of architectural decision-making instead of memorizing individual service descriptions. Practice comparing services based on security, availability, scalability, performance, and cost requirements.

Work through scenario-based questions that require you to identify the most appropriate architecture for a stated requirement. Pay particular attention to IAM, VPC design, storage selection, compute options, databases, high availability, disaster recovery, networking, serverless architectures, and cost management.

Finally, use practice questions to become comfortable with both multiple-choice and multiple-response formats. Review incorrect answers carefully and connect each mistake to the relevant domain or AWS architectural principle before returning to further practice.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Syllabus PDF

Candidates looking for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate syllabus PDF should use the official SAA-C03 Exam Guide published by AWS. The official guide contains the latest domain structure, task statements, technologies and concepts, and information about AWS services that are relevant to the examination.

Because AWS certification exams and their supporting guides may be revised, candidates should verify the current SAA-C03 exam guide before finalizing their preparation plan.

Conclusion

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate syllabus 2026 is built around four core areas: secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized architecture design. A structured study plan based on these domains can help candidates organize their preparation, identify weaker areas, and develop the architectural judgment required for the SAA-C03 examination.