AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-S02) Exam Notes

Table of Contents

1. Fundamentals
   • AWS Regions
   • AWS EC2
   • Elastic Load Balancers
   • Auto Scaling Groups
   • Elastic Block Storage
   • Elastic File System
   • RDS - Relational Database Service
   • Amazon Aurora
   • ElastiCache
   • Amazon S3
   • Route 53
2. Deep Dive
   • Advanced S3
   • AWS CLI, SDK, IAM Roles and Policies
   • Classic Architecture Discussion
   • Elastic Beanstalk
   • CloudFront
   • CloudWatch
   • CloudTrail
   • AWS Config
   • Global Accelerator
   • Snowball
   • Storage Gateway
   • Amazon FSx
   • Networking and VPC
   • Databases
   • SQS - Simple Queue Service
   • SNS - Simple Messaging Service
   • AWS Kinesis
   • Amazon MQ
3. Serverless
   • AWS Lambda Functions
   • DynamoDB
   • API Gateway
   • AWS Cognito
   • AWS SAM - Serverless Application Model
4. Security and Disaster Recovery
   • Advanced IAM
   • Encryption
   • SSM Parameter Store
   • Secrets Manager
   • CloudHSM
   • Shield
   • WAF - Web Application Firewall
   • Shared Responsibility Model
   • Disaster Recovery
   • DMS - Database Migration Tool
   • AWS DataSync
5. Other Services
   • CICD - Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery
   • CloudFormation
   • Containers in the Cloud
   • Data Analytics
   • Other Services (OpsWorks, Elastic Transcoder, Workspaces, Appsync)
   • More Solutions Architecture
6. Whitepapers
   • Well Architectured Framework
   • AWS Truster Advisor

Exam Description

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C02) examination is intended for individuals who perform in a solutions architect role. This exam validates an examinee's ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies.

It validates an examinee's ability to:

• Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.
• Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to an organization throughout the lifecycle of a project.

Preparation

• Official Exam Guide: https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-sa-assoc/AWS-Certified-Solutions-Architect-Associate_Exam-Guide.pdf

• The exam may contain two types of questions:

  • Multiple choice
  • Multiple response

• Minimum passing score: 720/1000

• Number of questions: 65

• Time: 130 minutes to complete the exam (with a possibility to request 30 minutes extra for non-native english speakers)

Exam Content

Domain	% of Examination
Design Resilient Architectures	30%
Design High-Performing Architectures	28%
Design Secure Applications and Architectures	24%
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures	18%
Total	100%

Credits

• These notes are based on the Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2021 course by Stephane Maarek

My other AWS Certification Notes

• AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C01)
• AWS Certified SysOps – Associate (SOA-C01)
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C01)
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01)